TCWiki talk:Editing threads
From TCWiki
The part of OLSAL that made it into the novelization (that I have) - i.e., the first couple threads, are already edited nicely and available on The OLSAL novelization site. This is heavy editing, and many of the "extra" stuff is out. Some of the subplots and such got edited out too, but the edited version there has some use. Contacting Josh L. might also help, as he was in charge of compiling the threads out and doing the included CDs.
...Editing third-person/first-person; much of tC is written in the third-person, so it'd make some sort of sense for the posts written in first-person to be edited so that they're in third-person. Unfortunately this may take away some from the writing in order to gain consistency, but I'd (personally) have consistency.
Also, for subplots/sidestories/omake; grouping these together somehow - either their own sections or their own pages - would be best. Songfics I'll likely end up converting into the sfdb codebase, so there is at least that.
Oh, and for the Izuko threads? I remember those. If I remember correctly the "What Now" thread can be placed fairly easily within the OLSAL-continuity; if nothing else it helps "ground" what else was happening, and has direct impact on the CoM and EM. (So I'd include it there, but likely on its own page with a note. Would that work?)
--ChibiJas 17:34, 18 Apr 2005 (PDT)
Weighing in, as the main page suggests.
A lot of this website is horribly out of date. For instance, the main page still has a link to this article, even though there's been no activity whatsoever for two and a half years. And since the idea was brought up so long ago, I don't want to try and reopen the suggestion. I was typing something more up, before I realized that BozoCat hit all of my points way back when. And since I know he'll see this, I want to bring attention to this page and the aforementioned fact that the main page should be looked at about this. For reference, I think we should establish backups of tC, but in the style of exact thread copies which have existed before. Which, I think, is being addressed somewhere else on this wiki... Vavrek 10:28, 19 Feb 2008 (PST)
Backing up both this site and the forums would be great, but I lack both resources and technical skills for the job. There are well over 100 wiki pages, and I'd estimate nearly 50 forum threads by now. Worse, most forum threads can't be viewed as one page for easy right-clicking and saving to a hard drive-- IBP can't handle threads of the length we generate and barfs. So each page of each thread will have to be archived. It's a monumental amount of work, best undertaken by a script.
There might be a backup and archive function for MediaWiki. Brent would know better than I, as this wiki's version of mediaWiki is very, very old. (3 years old, I think)
After that, we'll need a place to put the archive that's well-backed-up, and then keep it up to date on a regular basis. The keeping up to date is best undertaken by a script as well.
On the out of date-ness issue, can you be more specific? Or better yet, can you fix the things that are out of date, or leave comments on their talk pages? The wiki's too big for any one person to reasonably be expected to maintain, so this will have to be a community effort to keep things up to date.--BozoCat 11:41, 20 Feb 2008 (PST)
DaCyclops also had methods of using a script to parse a thread and generate an HTML file from it. From what I remember, he even got the appearance of the HTML file to mimic the board's default style, which improves readability over the more typical backups. For reference, I don't think I encouraged backing up the wiki itself... My primary concern is with the threads themselves, an example of my bias towards the "Only what's in the threads is real" viewpoint.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of how we would back this kind of stuff up. The first thing that comes to mind is just a regular update being given out to individuals who'd like to keep the assortment of HTML pages on their own computers. An authorspace equivalent to Continuity Monks, except we'd only maintain data. I'm not actually one of the code/server geeks of tC, I am merely displaying a fetish for redundancies. This domain/server itself could probably be used well for hosting thread backups (it already is, for early threads). My main goal is to have a redundancy for the forums and an easily downloadable archive package of tC, similar to DWC's website.
As for out of dateness... that was a generalized gripe written late at night. The kind of thing a person says at the start of a speech to get people on his side. When it comes to the actual matters, frankly, it's a gargantuan task and I tend to run away when I try to take those on. Hopefully, however, I'll manage to get into the habit of working on the wiki myself, over the next few months, and that will be a focus of mine. Vavrek 00:17, 23 Feb 2008 (PST)
