Happy birthday! I doubt I made it.

Thank you all for the birthday wishes, even if it was a terrible Monday for me. Luckily I get both Thursday and Friday off this week because of Thanksgiving.


I somehow missed this, but I wanted to say that I'm in favor of it if for no other reason than I see AO3 lasting a lot longer than this place might due to it being a whole *place*, if you know what I mean.

I've actually been dipping my toes into AO3 as a reader in the last few months, looking for some really specific things that I thought I might find there. I have finally been exposed to legitimately bad fanfiction and it reminds me to say that I love you guys.

What I really need to address, though, is that I simply no longer have the time to be "The Archivist" anymore. I think that ship sailed a long time ago and I didn't want to admit it, but I need to say now that I basically can't help do the archive work that I used to. Actually, I think I/we am/are like 5 years behind on uploading/backup of the current Archive, considering the last vote was 3 years ago.

I'm sorry to hear you had a bad day. I hope you can enjoy your time off, though!


Honestly, I've considered taking this over for a while now, but I didn't want to do it without talking to you first. Every summer I keep thinking that I should at least get the pieces posted that have been voted in, but I remembered that you backed them up somehow and I didn't know exactly what your process was, so I just sort of never did it. But basically, I would be fine taking over for you if that is what you want. I doubt I will be as thorough as you have been, but I am willing to give it a go.

I agree, if nothing else it would be another place to keep our best stuff in in case something unfortunate happens.


It's quite wild to me that I'm the one most familiar with it*, buuut yeah, having a screening procedure in place indeed does guarantee quality. On AO3 the difficult thing is sifting through the sea of fanfic to find the islands of Good Writing, more or less lol.

*Beside Heliosphoros, probably I seem to recall he's been posting their stories on AO3 as well.

That said, I'd be up to make the most legwork if we agreed with a tagging protocol or smth (my account should have a number of viable invite codes ready to be used) I should prolly make a dedicated thread for that?

Happy Thanksgiving, to anyone for whom that is relevant today.

A happy turkey day to all involved

Happy whatever it is wherever you are!
I just watched the movie Vengeance, and I've got to say it is one very fine movie.

Mind you, I did put more into it than was necessary, but what I generally did:
* give the story a read-through to catch typos & other oddities (usually for voting)
* correct obvious typos if the author had not
* upload 2 copies to the Archivist's shared Google Drive account (which may be more difficult nowadays with google changes)

* 1 copy for forum HTML formatting

* 1 copy for document formatting (i.e. "as intended" reading WYSIWYG)

* save a copy to my personal hard drive (now 2-3 hard drives ago)
* upload to the Archive subforum

Most of those steps can be skipped, and if we do just transition to AO3, we can cut out the google drive entirely, as I consider AO3 and Drive as having equal chances of going down in the future


I haven't bothered to try making an account myself yet (which to my understanding isn't really difficult so much as it is a bit slow with the invite-code policy) because, well, I didn't want a history on there; I even discovered that you can leave anonymous comments, tho my nerve failed me on that front, too

I actually love tagging systems from a user perspective, but have a huge problem applying them to works -- the pure open-ended-ness of tagging systems leaves me with decision paralysis

It's possible, I set up my own account quite some time ago so I can't remember how long the wait was. I have invite codes that should be still redeemable, though, so if anyone needs one...


I should add you can disable History and take private bookmarks; subscribing to a work or author is also, to the best of my knowledge, undetectable. You can also leave anonymous kudos as a guest, which don't take anything more than a click and are very appreciated by most small authors.


Yeah, I can relate lol. It doesn't help that my work doesn't interface well with common tropes like Enemies to Lovers and stuff

Hm, maybe

I’m just not sure how much I trust it, as I’m currently in the process of nuking an account elsewhere that was created with that “log in with Google” button, even tho I can’t find any direct evidence that it is linked to my google account (especially given how vocal and above all terminally online some minorities can be about fanfic)

But, like, even then, I have ideas floating around in my head, which I am deathly afraid of becoming “public” knowledge -- so there’s no way I could associate that with some “main” account, tied to the M:EM or not

Also, to let you know, I saw the thread you made, but I currently don't have the leftover processing power to compute, so I'll have to catch up to it later

========

Uhm, in other news, I am likely meeting a close friend in the meat for the first time who has become very sweet on me in the year or so I’ve known her; it will be a kind of long drive down to Houston where she’ll be visiting family, but surprisingly not awful for Texas scale

It very well looks like I’ve got myself a “date” and it excites and terrifies me

Have fun! Just remember to be your normal, wonderful self!

Crossing fingers! Hope you both have a great time :3

I absolutely agree that if we want the M:EM to last, we need to do something to reach a new audience. AO3 seems like a good place to get some attention, but I think we should also consider moving ourselves to a discord server. These days discord does most of the things a forum does, and pepper are far more likely to join a discord server than a web forum.

Also, because I'm so rarely here these days, I'm not sure if I have told you all that my wife and I are expecting our third child. I thought I had, but considering the fact that new casually mentioning it to my rpg group the other day and finding out that they didn't know, I'm severely doubting my communication skills right now.

Discord Servers have always seemed... like evry poor forum replacements to me, mostly because archive dredging is a ROYAL PAIN. I'll be honest, I can't really stand discord's "chat room" style interface in general. But I seem to be of the "Graah kids these days" persuasion by my preferences in the digital, so I'm probably destined to be left behind somewhere along the line if I keep insisting on functionality like NOT infinite scroll and threaded conversations with entries in chronological order rather than pushing "newest" or "upvoted"

Also, congrats Aaarrrgh (and Ms. Aaarrrgh)

Discord has added a thread functionality, but it's kinda wonky still. There is also a search function, but I absolutely agree that it's a lot harder to find old stuff unless it has been pinned.

You did tell us, back in July, but I'm still very happy for you and your family!

I do remember glimpsing news about a little Aaarrrgh the third, tho I felt too far removed to comment on it now that I've kind of come back; regardless, congratulations and much luck with the new addition!


As for Discord, I am well and truly mixed on it.

I have much the same issues as Tevish with the basic layout and functionality of Discord as an instant messaging service over older forum style social media (and I do lump IRCs like Discord/Telegram into the same category as Reddit/Twitter/the like) simply due to the actual goal such things. My method of speaking online does not line up with those goals, and I have more than once driven myself up a wall due to the interface design (e.g. trying to play catchup in a group of about a dozen active posters out of 3 dozen total, just because of the manner in which Discord presents unread channels). That's without getting into the big problems I have with the functions they lock behind a premium subscription. I do actually hate Discord as a platform.

That said, after basically all my friends migrated from Telegram to Discord I've had to deal with it and can say that if a server is properly set up, it can actually be a pretty decent replacement for regular web forums -- just not as much for hosting and reading long-form stories as we do here. I only just now see the new threading that Aaarrrgh is talking about on the main server I frequent, but it's worth giving a quick idea how closely Discord has developed along the lines of its predecessors:



You can see the basic structure closely mimics a forum already, and this is a tiny little 4-person server not utilizing the full utility of the UI. Though each channel is more equivalent to a subforum (like the M:EM subforum) without threads, it is also possible to create threads within each channel for more focused conversation, and it seems the new function is making it even closer to what we're used to, with a top-level view of all threads available instead of being greeted first with the channel and having to follow further links to the threads. There's a lot more I could explain, but it's difficult to find the proper words to convey, especially before questions are asked.

Regardless of whether or not any of that made sense, I do think that a Discord server would be better set up as a conversation center for the M:EM while the Archive exists on AO3, as I don't think either could serve both purposes (unless I'm missing something with AO3, but I haven't noticed any groups feature like on other fanfiction websites).

Let the record show, I'm also a grouchy old man who despises the idea of using discord. In part it's an issue of principle, in that I do not agree with the direction of the technology. It, further, ingrains in me a general dislike of any alternate form of social media that I refuse to participate in. I have no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Reddit, no Snapchat.
I refuse, categorically, to participate in a society more demanding that I engage with it to function in common culture.

Fair. However, with anyone that I consider even loosely an online acquaintance I maintain the following policy: I will not demand a "timely" reply to any of my messages unless the matter has been established as time-sensitive, and I ask for the same respect. Some have warned me that if they do not respond within X days they probably missed or forgot the message so I feel free to send a poke once in a while.

Instant messaging is a format that holds the speaker to a less strict writing standard imho, and thus is a bit less taxing for my perfectionist brain. Would I rely only on, say, Discord to organize anything more complex than a night out with a couple of friends? No. But casual chats work better for brainstorming, for example, and don't force me to actively log into NGA to check if somebody sent something my direction - less regular tasks to take active care of, which is always a plus for people like me.

Long story short, I try out new stuff to see whether some of its functions can serve me. If they do, I take that part and ignore or forcibly remove the rest. Furthermore, I rely on tech-savy friends recommending the most promising stuff so I can just skip past most trash.

Yeesh, I just poked my head in over at mtg Salvation. It's shocking how far that place fell. Which has coincided with a small emotional freak out on my part and feel compelled to apologize for my overall silence the past few months. I know it's not contributed well to the overall atmosphere, but I'm always around. I've just had a stunning lack of much to say and I'm sorry if that's been discouraging.

You guys mean a lot to me and it's doing me no mental good to think I might have dragged things down around here just by my disengagement.