User talk:Euphrosyne2u

From Jackcentric

Welcome! Looks like we both stopped in at the same time! --Bedawyn 16:47, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Re: No Greater Gift -- Great! I'm working on the series boxes today, so that works out really well. When you're happy with the regular story page, would you try adding the series navbox? Instructions over here. Thanks! --Bedawyn 18:27, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi, again. Yes, you used the Talk pages exactly right. It's possible to reply on your own Talk page -- you could edit this page, for instance, to reply to me here -- but if you do that there's no guarantee the other person will ever see it. When you reply on their Talk page, the recipient gets the automatic notice that they've got a new message. The only thing I would add is to sign your messages. On the toolbar above the edit field, the second button from the left will insert your timestamped signature, or you can do it by hand by typing four squiggles (~) in a row.

For No Greater Gift, you edited your user page instead of a new story page. This is actually a really good habit to get into, I just didn't mention it in the how-to because I didn't want to complicate things further. Basically, it means you're using your userpage as a draft workspace until you get things looking the way you want them, and then you can copy the final product into the real new page. So right now you can reach what you did for No Greater Gift by clicking your username; when you're ready to edit the real page, you can create a new page using the box & button at the bottom of the how-to. Or actually the easiest way to create a new page? Simply pretend it exists already and link to it, like this: No Greater Gift (I typed "[[No Greater Gift]]".) That create a redlink, and when you're ready to work on the page, simply click and it will take you straight to the edit field.

Let me know if you have any other questions.--Bedawyn 19:08, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Contents 1 I Were the Heavens 2 Ratings and warnings 3 Categories 4 WIPs and F'lock 5 Series 6 Sunday, Feb 14 7 Sunday, March 14

[edit] I Were the Heavens

I love that story! In fact, I've added a mutated version of it (in which the admiral isn't future!Jack but an OC) to my own personal canon. The author information is actually just fine on the story page; it's just not completely categorized. If you look at the story page, you'll see down at the bottom that Sam's name is redlinked. That means the category doesn't exist yet, since this is the first of Sam's stories to go up. So you create the category by clicking the red link and then adding [[Category:Authors]] into the edit field (of Sam's new page, not the story page). It doesn't need anything else there, just the Authors category. When you save it, it will create a category page for Sam that is a subcategory of Authors, and it'll be findable then through the Browse stories link in the sidebar.

Now... search, that's another hassle. Search is being wonky and I need to work out some problems with it, so don't expect it to do much for now. :-( --Bedawyn 22:27, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

:-D Yes, I'm realizing along the way that there's a lot of bits and pieces that I've learned to take for granted, so I don't even think about them until I'm trying to figure out how to explain it to someone else. But mentioning the Sandbox on the to-do list reminded me of using the Wikipedia Sandbox years ago and how intimidating it was, how completely unlike anything I'd ever done before, not just learning a new markup language but the very notion of being able to edit almost everything on someone else's site, real-time. And I wasn't creating pages from scratch then! It must be even worse if you're trying to learn the markup and technical bits and the editorial/organization bits at the same time. So congratulations. : -) And you're definitely helping already, just letting me see what kind of problems new users are likely to have -- because if we're lucky and the site gets popular, there will be a lot of new users having similar problems later! --Bedawyn 00:30, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Ratings and warnings

Hi, there. I was actually hoping to write a help page for ratings later today! In the infobox (the colored box), go ahead and put the author's rating or whatever else you think would be most helpful. I think I started out using a standardized system in the infobox, saw you were using the author's rating, and decided I liked that better. However, in the categories section, please use one of the standardized categories here. That way readers can just look for things in, say, Teen, and not have to search in separate categories for PG, PG-13, PG-15, etc. (And whatever that FRAO system is... I still can't read those acronyms. Actually, I was surprised fairly recently to run across someone from outside the US/UK, who said even the PG/NC-17 system was unfamiliar to her; that's part of why I'd like to keep to standardized categories that use words instead of initials.) Now, as for how we define the standardized system, I went with what makes sense to me; that's something that can evolve over time, as more people throw their opinions into the ring.

For warnings, I'd like to keep a clear distinction between things that really do need warnings and those that are just labels; most of the things that show up in author's warnings sections these days really are just labels. (Yeah, jaded old fan speaking again.) Some things do need warnings; you can use one of these. They've all got instructions for using them, and I hope I made the process simple enough and the instructions comprehensible enough! I spent a lot of time fussing over those, trying to get them both working right and looking right; the positioning is still an issue. There's ...things... going on with the margin floats and alignment and such; if the story only needs one warning, you can probably get it look right by putting the warning code underneath the storybox code and before the author's "By:" line and then adding or deleting blank lines until you hit on the right combination. If it's got more than one warning, I wouldn't even worry about making it look good yet, just as long as the warnings are in there somewhere. I think we need to have more stories up before we can get a good sense of what the positioning needs to be to work with the widest variety of stories.

If you see something else that you think really needs a full-fledged warning box, that isn't covered by one of the ones already there, please let me know. But I think most other things will be fine with just categories. There is a Category:Sex Keywords already that new kink-type categories can go into. And because I happen to like mpreg as a genre -- but not most of what gets posted as mpreg -- I actually made a whole set of categories just for that. :-D

--Bedawyn 18:11, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

Yep, treat it just like the Author categories. You can add multiples; I broke them into separate lines on the sample listing just so it would fit in the copy-me shaded area, but it's not necessary. It also doesn't hurt, though, if you find it easier to read with lines between. I generally add a space between each category to keep it compact but still easy to read, but the software doesn't care one way or the other. In fact, the software will list them all at the bottom of the page regardless of where you put the category -- at the top, in the middle, in the middle of a sentence even. So if you want to mention or link to a category without actually adding the page to the category, you need to tell the software not to treat it like a category. So to type [[Category:XXXX]], you have two options. You can type "<nowiki>[[Category:XXXX]]</nowiki>" (the nowiki tags are useful for lots of things) and it will come out as plain text. Or you can type "[[:Category:XXXX]] (note the colon in front), and that creates a link to the category but doesn't add it to the page. --Bedawyn 20:50, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh, one more thing. In general, we should be avoiding personalized categories, but there's one exception: Recommendations! If you want to make a category for your own recs, name it [[Recs: YourName]] and stick in Category:Recommended Works. Eventually, I'll write something up for that, but I thought you might like to know now, since you seemed to be working through your recs. Well, actually, it almost looks like you're working through my recs, at least half of them. *g* --Bedawyn 23:23, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

For someone who hasn't edited a wiki before, you're doing fine, really. There are lots of little bits and pieces in it -- don't worry about getting as many stories as possible done right now. Getting the help files right is really more important right now, so that when we "go live" we can minimize the problems other people have. Yes, listing LiveJournals is fine; ideally, we'd list all the places a story is available, though I'm not searching for alternate locations if I don't have them handy already. The idea is that we list the URLs we know of, if someone else comes along later and knows of another location, they can add it then. If someone's journal gets deleted, then whoever first finds out the link is broken will be able to erase it. Easy evolution and constant self-correction, which is why Wikis are so much sexier than a normal website. *g* Anyway, you might want to read Help:How To Add Links. I'll take a look at Joolz and see what's going on there.

I've just been rereading Dissolution, and my gut instinct is that it does deserve some sort of red-box warning, but we don't have one that fits and I'm not sure what it would be. It's not quite torture; I suppose you could make that argument since the virus is inflicted by the aliens, but it's not really what people would think of as torture. And it's not quite Deathfic, since he's all better at the end. I can't think of what else to call it though; Graphic Grossness? Any thoughts? --Bedawyn 01:01, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, I just checked Joolz, and she's showing up in the authors list for me. Maybe you fixed it before I got to it? She was listed under both Authors and the H/C genre category, so I took her out of the latter. --Bedawyn 01:09, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

We have a warning for deathfics, over here. On second thought, I'm not sure the graphic grossness does need a redbox warning, since it's not really a trigger; something more like the deathfic might be better, same format but a different color. "Graphic medical descriptions" might work. But the fact that I'm already over it leads me to think that however extreme it may be while reading, it's still only a squick and not a trigger. I don't know. For now, we can leave it as a note in the text, and make a decision when we have a few more stories that are similar, so we can see what they have in common. --Bedawyn 01:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

I didn't see anything under T, so I guess you fixed that. Your name wasn't showing up under Authors, because the category code only had one bracket on each side, instead of two (external links take one, internal take two). And you're right, by default, wiki pages can only be deleted by someone with admin privileges. And I'm glad you posted those stories when you did; I don't remember reading them before, and I came here in disappointment after finding nothing new to read on LiveJournal. :-) --Bedawyn 04:31, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

[edit] WIPs and F'lock

WIPs are cool; there's a length category just for them: Category:WIPs. I wonder if Jack/Face of Boe should be its own category; offhand, I can't remember reading that before! F'locking... it's up to you. I don't want to disallow f'locked URLs, 'cause sometimes popular stories get f'locked and you never know when something's going to get locked unexpectedly... or get unlocked unexpectedly. Trying to keep up with them would be a hassle. So all I'm going to ask is that if you (or anyone) put up a f'locked URL, that you mark it as such so people aren't disappointed by clicking then being locked out. But whether to include it or not in the first place, I'd leave that decision to whoever.

I really need to get back into the habit of working on it every night too. I was for a while, but there's actually been more Jack!fic coming across the newsletter lately than usual, so the wiki has seemed less urgent. Where are you that you're still snowed in? I keep hearing about DC and being glad I moved away. :-) --Bedawyn 00:14, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm in Baltimore... and just found out that we're expecting another 10 inches or more Tuesday and Wednesday...I MAY try to go to work tomorrow, and if that happens I'll pack a bag and plan in case I need to stay (I work in Annapolis and it's a 35 mile commute) so if it's nasty I'll go to the hotel acrtoss the street from my office and spend the night there cause I wont be able to get back in here. I'll think about the story (What Will Become of Your Young Pride is the title and it's long but still a WIP). I posted it to my yahoo group, but since I still dont have the control panel access to my own website I can't put it up there. MAybe I'll send it to Torchwood slash and link to it there. Well I gotta go pack (just in case) I put a good one up 'Reminiscing' course I had to re-read it first (there's just no resisting it). No I gotta check to see if the fic that it is the sequel to should be here as well...more re-reading!--Euphrosyne2u 00:39, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Series

Hi, there! [[Category:Series]] is already a subcategory of [[Category:Stories]], though I keep wondering whether I should move it to the Format section instead. Either way, it should only be on the series masterpage and not on the individual story pages. For the individual story pages, you want to look at either Template:Series or Template:Companion Story. You can check What Never Should Be for an example of how it looks when finished. No set guidelines yet for what should be on the series page itself, and the template for the series page probably still needs work, so I'd appreciate hearing opinions on it. --Bedawyn 22:37, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, that's one and a half votes for Format, so I've gone ahead and moved it there. Any thoughts on naming conventions for the series masterpages? I named the Blucougar one "Series: What Never Should Be" because "What Never Should Be" itself was already the name of an individual story, and that's going to be the case for a lot of series -- but not for all of them. Should we try to be consistent about it or would that just be one more thing for people to try to remember? --Bedawyn 22:49, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

We could add that information to the series navbox template, but it would start to get really complicated, so I'd rather avoid it. Right now, the navbox template is just one more line to copy and paste, and it's short enough that after we've done a few dozen of them, we'll probably be able to remember the code without having to go back and copy it from the template. The storybox template itself is already long enough, so making the series navbox template longer wouldn't be my first choice. So I'd prefer to leave all the other information on the series masterpage itself, maybe with something short in a Notes: line on the story page. The navbox will create a link to the series masterpage, so readers should be able to go there in one click to get the details. --Bedawyn 22:58, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Huh, it's been a while since I looked at the series stuff; I see now that I actually built the "Series:" part into the template, so if someone creates the story page first then uses the redlink to create the series page (which is what I think most people will probably do), it will automatically include the "Series:" in the name of the new masterpage. So there isn't anything else for people to remember. I'm just concerned about it not alphabetizing correctly if some series masterpages get created with the "Series:" and some without. On the other hand, it might be better on author pages to have their series masterpages obviously set apart from their story pages, and it is possible to make them alphabetize correctly, it just takes an extra step. So I guess I'm worrying needlessly.

In other news, I'm really glad you added "In Perpetuity." I've avoided that before because the summary made it look like just another COE aftermath story, which I'm rarely in the mood to read, but of course now I know it's completely different (and completely wonderful). But adding more categories for it caused me to stumble a bit. Do you have any thoughts on the Category:Fanworks by Relationship categories? "In Perpetuity" is clearly gen, but ... Using the basic assumption of gen, het, slash, I created categories for het and slash back in the beginning, but those are both really intermediate categories, meant to hold all the individual relationship subcategories; there won't be many stories that belong in the slash or het categories themselves. In the same vein, I originally created a Gen category, then ended up separating it into separate Friendship and Family categories that can act as containers the way het and slash do. Then I realized when I went to file "In Perpetuity" that we'd lost a place for stories that aren't about relationships at all. I think I originally meant the "Jack Solo" category to hold things like "In Perpetuity", but somehow that's morphed in my mind to mean "Jack masturbation stories." Maybe a better name would do the job? I also tried recreating the Gen category and putting Friendship and Family stories as subcategories there, but then realized that those individual relationships may be platonic, but their stories might still be het or slash overall. And I'm half-inclined to move Family over to the Genre section, but then the individual relationship subcategories like Jack-Alice and Jack-Grey would need to be moved back over to the "Fanworks by Relationship" section and put... somewhere. Any thoughts on how to handle this tangle?

Well, I'm old and narrow-minded too, and I rabidly disagree with you on that. In fact, it's one of the things that I spent years ranting about back in the late nineties and early oughts, all the newer writers who thought that slash stories had to include sex. Ran into a lot of really bad sex scenes that way, written because the authors thought they were a required element even though they weren't comfortable writing it and it didn't organically belong in the story. But that's a debate for another time. *g*

I know what you mean about the gen stories. It's perfectly possible to have a gen Jack/Ianto story, because the relationship is canonical; if it's not explicit and the relationship isn't the focus of the story, it can still be gen. (Jack/Owen, on the other hand, would always be slash because it isn't canonical.) At the same time, I don't think we need the pairing categories added to every single story where they're mentioned. A gen story that includes Jack/Ianto wouldn't necessarily need the Jack/Ianto tag, and having it would probably confuse people; if people are looking in the Jack/Ianto category, they're going to be looking for stories where the relationship is the focus and probably won't be happy to find gen stories mixed in. So it might be appropriate, for instance, to mention the pairing in the storybox but not include the category. On the other hand, a story where the relationship is the focus would have to have the pairing category and can't be gen.

My main concern right now is how to handle categories like Jack-Alice or Jack-Owen. People do look for friendship fics, or other platonic-relationship fics, and I want them to be able to find them. But it will be misleading if we put them as subcategories under Gen, because the stories might mix platonic with het or slash relationships. For instance, I gave Ashes & Dust a Jack-Tish tag, because even though that relationship isn't the main focus of the story, it's a big enough part that Tish fans will want to be able to find and read it. But the story as a whole is most definitely not gen. I'm not so worried about where to put the stories themselves; I think people will instinctively add the appropriate relationship subcategories (Jack/Estelle, or Jack/Ten, or Jack-Rhys, or whatever) once they know how to add categories. I'm more worried about where to put the platonic subcategories on an organizational level, so that people can find what they're browsing for without tripping over things they're not looking for.

Or maybe I'm just confusing myself and worrying too much. :-) --Bedawyn 00:45, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

The characters line in the storybox may be searchable, if I ever figure out what weird thing the search was doing, but it's not browseable. The categories at the bottom of the page are both searchable and browseable. So that if you're looking at a story, if you see either Jack-Owen or Jack/Owen in the categories, you'll know you might not want to read that story. On the other hand, if you are an Owen fan, you might be looking for either platonic or slash stories but not both, and you'd be able to find either kind by using the Fanworks by Relationship index. That's one of the strengths of using a wiki. If someone were looking specifically for Jack-Tish or Jack/Kathy stories at an archive, for instance, they'd have a hard time finding them, because the archive owners would have to code the search engine to include every platonic and nonplatonic pairing, and they're just not going to do that for all the minor characters. With a wiki, it's a matter of minutes for someone to add a category for Jack/MyFavoriteMinorCharacterThatNoOneElseCaresAbout, and when someone else comes along and decides they like that minor character too, they'll be able to find those stories easily. Yay wikis!

When it comes to subjective relationships, I think we have it easier than in other fandoms, simply because Jack's Jack. :-) The relationship may not be canonical, but I think Jack's propensities are. So if a story has Jack thinking romantically or sexually about Owen or Tosh or Kathy or K9, as long as it's not the focus of the story, I think it's safe to call it gen. But if the story has them thinking about him that way, in any way more than a passing "it's Jack, of course he's gorgeous" way, or if it has them acting instead of just thinking, then it can't be gen. Does that make sense?

My problem is what to do when a story has both Jack/Ianto and Jack-Owen as significant elements. The Jack-Owen in a story might be platonic, but if we put Jack-Owen under Gen, then people will assume the story's gen, which it might not be when you consider the other, non-Owen things that are also going on. Right now, I've got the individual platonic relationships divided up under Friendship and Family categories, with Gen as a separate category for stories where there's no major relationship in the story. This isn't ideal, since there's some overlap between them, but I guess it will do for now. --Bedawyn 02:06, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Sunday, Feb 14

Okay, I've given up on topic headers, because our topics keep straying. :-)

Lots of stuff to answer in your LJ message -- remind me if I miss anything:

For the series stuff, don't worry about it if it stresses you out. It's best to have the series navbox and the series masterpage, for all the reasons you talked about yesterday, but it doesn't cause a problem if it's not there. But do give it a try and let me know if the instructions aren't clear. Start with the template link I gave you yesterday, for the series navbox, and if that's unclear, you might want to start at Category:Templates and read down from there. But I tried to make the instructions on the templates themselves stand alone, so if they don't make sense, please let me know what part needs work!

Finding the info is a problem -- no one should have to have separate Word documents to keep track of things. If you're tempted to, then something is wrong on the wiki. Now, some of the stuff, like working with the extra templates (like the series navbox and the trigger warnings), that's extra stuff that the average newbie won't need. For power users, who are going to be adding stories regularly, I definitely want to put together a sort of quicklinks box that people can add to their userpages, but I haven't got to that yet. But for the essential stuff that everyone will need to add even one story, it should all be in the Help:How To Add Listings page or linked from there. If you're not finding something there, please let me know what you're looking for! There's also a link in the sidebar, right above the Search box, to all the help pages.

About story lengths, yeah, most of the categories are pretty freeform and intuitive, but the rating and length categories are two areas where we need to stick to the defined existing categories, in order for people to be able to find things. You don't need to worry about checking the ones you've done in the past, though; that's one of the things I'm doing as part of my admin patrol anyway. For the series stories, on the story pages go ahead and use the length of the actual story. Seeing the series navbox on the page should be enough to tell readers that the story is part of a longer work. For anything like that, the story page should contain information only about that particular story; more general stuff should all go on the series masterpage. --Bedawyn 17:41, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

More on categories: Category:Hurt/Comfort is under Category:Fanworks by Genre, but the idea is that people don't need to know where it is to add it. If you put [[Category:Hurt/Comfort]] on a storypage, as long as it's capitalized and spelled correctly, it will show up right regardless. I need to worry about where the category is, as an admin, but the user adding stories doesn't. The user who's looking for a hurt/comfort story will need to be able to find it, but I had thought Genre was the obvious place they'd look. Do you think it should be under Keywords instead?

It took me a while to get used to using the exclamation points myself -- I saw them showing up for years before I was comfortable using them! But they are pretty widespread by now, and I've learned to appreciate them for their brevity -- it's so much easier to type "sick!Jack" than "stories where Jack is sick." The keywords subcategories should be pretty specific, that's the point of having them. None of them are required, which is why I didn't mention them on the How To Add Fic page, but for people who want to find very specific types of fic, they're there to be used. Think of the keywords categories as tags, while the broader "Fanworks by ...." categories contain more traditional categories.

Year that Wasn't -- I can definitely change that. I got used to using it on my Delicious page because it was shorter, and have to keep reminding myself to spell it out where other people are going to use it. The Aftermath category you're referring to is specifically for stories dealing with the aftermath; there are other categories that relate to the Year for stories that aren't about the aftermath. "Fanworks by Episode" contains categories for the individual episodes in the arc, and "Fanworks by Timeline" contains a category for stories set during the Year (Category:The Year That Never Was). And no, you're not overthinking! That's exactly the sort of thinking we need to get the subcategories arranged properly. You were just looking at only a subset of the categories that already existed. :-) --Bedawyn 18:07, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Hey, I slapped together another help page you might want to look at: Help:User Subpages. It's another nonessential thing that you might not want to deal with, but you might find it helpful for keeping track of things. If you look at my user page for example, I just archived last month's talk to a subpage to keep the current talk page's length under control, and I have two draft pages (one for new stories, one for other stuff) linked from my main page -- that lets me keep the draft work handy while still using my main page to store quicklinks. --Bedawyn 18:42, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Hey, question for you about the length categories. I set them up that way because I'm neurotically detailed and I use those classifications on my own Delicious tags already. But I am a little concerned that it's going to be nonintuitive for users -- people will think "novel" automatically, but most won't think "long novel" vs. "short novel", for instance, and if the archive site doesn't already give a word count, well, no one's going to want to run an entire novel on multiple pages through a word counter! So I'm thinking of combining those two into one "Novel" category and combining novelettes and novellas into a "Long Story" category. I'd still like to keep the detailed classifications -- I find them really useful when trying to decide what I have time to read. (Plus, I'm enough of an elitist that I want people to learn the words "novella" and "novelette"; it drives me bonkers when award sites or archives class novellas as novels.) But we could treat them as subcategories a level below. So, for instance, Fanworks by Length would have just one Novel category, and the Novel category would have short and long subcategories; if we know the actual wordcount of a novel, it can go in the narrower subcategory, and if we don't know the word count, it can stay in the broader "Novel" parent category. Does that sound like a good idea? My desire for usability and user-friendliness is fighting with my anal retentiveness, I'm afraid. --Bedawyn 00:33, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Also, do you think the length category should be required or merely recommended? --Bedawyn 00:39, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've simplified the length categories a bit. The narrower categories still exist, they've just been made subcategories so it won't cause a problem if people don't use them. --Bedawyn 02:40, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Sunday, March 14

Ack! That date means it's now about a month since I've done any real work on the site. :-( Hopefully, I'll get back on the ball soon. Those two authors look good to me -- they're showing up where they're supposed to. Maybe your browser was pulling a cached version of the page? The warning boxes look good too! Well, as good as they can... I'm guessing you've figured out what I meant about the spacing being odd. But one good thing coming from the hassle of redesigning my work web site, is that I'm learning the css I need for this one. At least now I have a clue where to start looking for the fix on the box spacing, once I've recovered enough brain cells to work on it.

Hope you find your flash drive -- and you're braver than me, quitting a job in this economy! Good luck. --Bedawyn 22:44, 14 March 2010 (UTC)