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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Sidious, Snoke and Salacious B Crumb’s Sarcastic and Sassy Situation Saloon (Fanfic Social Thread)

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction and Writing Resource' started by Briannakin , Oct 11, 2017.

  1. Briannakin

    Briannakin Former Manager star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Feb 25, 2010
    It was only like a 5-6 on my 'migraine pain scale' so really not that bad, but I was nauseous. So I took acetaminophen with codeine and a Gravol. When I woke back up I took a muscle relaxer because my body was just in a world of hurt from skiing.

    But yeah, the brain fog this morning is real and I'm getting like nothing accomplished at work. But I just got a delivery notification. I think it might be my medicated bath bombs!! (Medicated with drugs that are legal in Canada. If you know, then you know ;) )
     
    gizkaspice likes this.
  2. Pandora

    Pandora Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Apr 13, 2005
    The reddit post isn't working for me in the thread (possibly because I'm on the work computer, where the browser is set to private mode?) but I can open it in a separate window. Anyhow, I read it last night, and I am reasonably certain I know who wrote it. She hasn't been seen here in fanfiction for years now, so her screenname probably wouldn't mean anything to most people here, but she used to be a very regular user/writer, and she used to be a fanfiction moderator, though I think she had resigned that post and was moderating elsewhere at the time of the infamous move.

    So yes, I was there--though as a mere user, as I have never been a moderator, so I never knew what went on behind the scenes--and the story of The Move is sad, pathetic, and hilarious. Here's how I remember it: the move was first announced in a thread on April 1, 2010. The date was just a coincidence, all joking aside (and there was much JCC-style joking) but it became more and more fitting as weeks, months, and then a year passed, and the move still hadn't actually happened. Finally! in March 2012, nearly two years after the original announcement, the move happened. Only guess what, the new boards weren't quite ready for use, so they had these temporary boards for which one had to register anew with a temporary account. Thus began the "Pizza Run." We were informed this situation would last perhaps a few weeks.

    It lasted a while longer than that. The new boards finally became a reality in September 2012. Several days before they went live, one of the RPF moderators posted in the forum fanfiction and RPF were sharing on the temporary boards with the news we all know so well now--that all posts were truncated at 10,000 characters. If you really want to know the details of that saga as they happened, there's a thread in the communications forum. I will say only that it was a reminder that, contrary to popular belief, the internet isn't always "forever."
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2021
  3. ViariSkywalker

    ViariSkywalker Kessel Run Hostess Extraordinaire star 4 VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Aug 9, 2002
    I know this is being nitpicky (sorry!), but that reddit user said the read-only Classic board was created in 2000 when they switched from Snowboards to IGN, and that's not exactly how it happened. I wasn't around for the switch to IGN, but the switch to a read-only forum happened in 2003 when it was decided that 3 new boards would be created for Before, Saga, and Beyond. I joined in August 2002 and was posting new stories in what is now the Classic forum up through 2003. I had a few stories that I ended up moving over to the new boards (or more accurately, reposting them there, as many people did at the time). As I recall, the reason for the increased number of boards was because of the insane volume of fanfic traffic. When there was only one fanfic forum and one resource forum (or was it just the one forum? I can't quite remember if the resource forum existed when I started here, although I think it did), stories would get updated and then fall off of page 1 within minutes. It wasn't uncommon to go back a dozen or more pages looking for fics that you'd been reading. The hope was that, by increasing the number of fanfic boards and splitting them up by era, stories would have a better chance of being seen, and people who spent most of their time in one era wouldn't have to wade through tons of fics to find something to interest them.

    History person here, don't mind me. If I'm remembering any of this wrong, someone correct me! I hadn't thought of all this in a long time. I'd nearly forgotten about the ill-timed April fool's day announcement, lol.

    @Pandora that's how I remember the move to Xenforo as well... kind of hilarious, but at the same time sad because we lost a lot of users who ended up moving on during that 6 month hiatus and never came back when the boards reopened.

    Edits for clarity because I accidentally posted before I was ready. :p
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2021
  4. Jedi Knight Fett

    Jedi Knight Fett Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2014
    Nah I find the history of anything interesting. I of course joined just under 2 years after the switch. From IGN to here
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2021
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  5. Kit'

    Kit' Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Oct 30, 1999
    @jcgoble3 and @Jedi Knight Fett - finally saw it this morning and it was definitely tapatalk that was the issue.

    They actually missed another move that happened in October of 1999. It's the reason why my username is Kit' rather than Kithera. I originally made my username a couple of weeks after The Phantom Menace came out (when I published my first fic which I wrote riding home on the bus. Both the fic and the bus ride were terrible). That move meant that many usernames were lost, mine included. There was no way to get back into the accounts and you would keep being told that the username was taken, so you couldn't make another one of that name. I shortened mine and then a couple of years ago Kithera became available, so I nabbed that too - even though I don't use it.

    One of the original USJS threads also got eaten in a move (long before the big move of above but after the username one), but it's so long ago I don't remember the details. Just that it disappeared and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

    Edit: I became mod just after the three boards were created (which was when the classic board was made). I was one of the people who argued passionately for the three fanfic boards because as @ViariSkywalker said, stories once posted would last maybe half an hour on the first page before quickly dropping. It was almost impossible to keep track of anything. Some people argued that it was 'too bad, so sad' if your fic dropped and you'd just have to work on being more popular, which was a little depressing for new authors. Better arguments for keeping it was that meant that people might branch out from their usual era. In the end there was a massive vote and the new three boards plus resource board were created. That was when I was asked to join the modding team because we needed stacks of mods given the speed at which things moved.
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2021
  6. jcgoble3

    jcgoble3 Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Nov 7, 2010
    Y'all are actually wrong about what the real Pizza Run was. :p :-B

    The Move™ was NOT the Pizza Run, although it was likely accelerated by the Pizza Run. The Pizza Run was an incident around mid-ish-2011 (I believe around the end of August, but my memory is not that detailed) during which the boards were down for (IIRC) two full days straight, while an IGN error page cheerfully announced that the maintenance team or somebody else was on a "pizza run" and the boards would be back "soon".

    Two days of downtime sounds excessively long and bad enough by itself, but there were two contributing factors that added more than the sum of their parts to the mess. First, IGN had completely stopped offering TF.N technical support. I don't know how much that contributed to the length of the outage, but it certainly couldn't have helped, and there was quite possibly some discussions going on about "can you please fix this even though you said you wouldn't?"

    Second, when the boards finally came back up, the email server stayed down – permanently. And because IGN had ended technical support, IGN wouldn't fix it. That doesn't sound too bad (just no watched topic and PM notifications, right?) until you realize that in those days, in order for a new user to join the boards, they provided their selected username and email address, after which the system would email them a temporary password – and those temporary passwords could not be sent! And there was NOTHING the board admins could do about it because plaintext passwords can't be retrieved (which is actually good security design; if a site ever sends you your actual password in plain text, rethink whether you should be on that site because that means bad guys can obtain your password as well).

    From the time of the pizza run until the start of The Move™, it was simply not possible for ANY new users to join the Jedi Council Forums because they could never get a password to log in. It was also not possible for anyone to reset their password, so if you forgot or lost your password during that time, you were hosed.

    So yeah, THAT was the Pizza Run. Not The Move™, which was its own separate ordeal.
     
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  7. ViariSkywalker

    ViariSkywalker Kessel Run Hostess Extraordinaire star 4 VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Aug 9, 2002
    Lol, now that you mention it, I do vaguely recall that happening. [face_thinking] I also had a 3-month-old around that time (my gosh, he's nearly 10 now, what even?), so I probably wasn't checking into the boards as often. :p

    I'm loving this recounting of everyone's experiences with the boards' history. Really fascinating.
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2021
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  8. Jedi Knight Fett

    Jedi Knight Fett Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2014
    I’ve been able to put together most of what happened and why the boards moved, but it’s still cool to hear about. IGN seems to have been kinda rude. Maybe I got them wrong, but from all I have gathered it seems all pretty much a classic dump and run
     
  9. mavjade

    mavjade Former Manager star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 10, 2005
    Yeah, the timeline from that Reddit post is a bit off, but the basics are correct. I was a mod during the move and it was pretty stressful. Keep in mind (and I know most of you all know this, but for anyone new that might not know) none of the mods or admins are paid, this is all volunteer. At first we thought it was going to happen very soon so we were scrambling to get things prepared and to backup what we could/get people to back up what they wanted to keep. But then it drug out forever and we didn't know when it was going to happen, but when it came time it was a scramble again because they gave us very little warning after leaving us hanging for a year.

    That was 100% the right thing to do! I wasn't around before the split, but it was crazy how fast stories dropped off the first page even once it was separated into the eras, I can't imagine what it was like before that!

    With no new movies coming out (that we knew of at the time) and the number of stories written dropping like crazy, after the move we decided to put them all back together in the hopes that it would help people to branch out more to interact other eras. It would have been less work to just leave things as they were because we could have just moved everything based on era, but we had to go through and prefix all of the stories with the era prefixes to combine. We could do it page by page, but there were still hundreds of pages of stories to do and only three of us to do it. But we thought it was the right thing for fanfic as a community.


    Yep! That was the original Pizza Run! I don't remember the time line like I do the move, but I think you are right it was 2 or 3 days. But then the move did also officially become a Pizza Run, we even made magnets as giveaway swag for Celebration VI that year. I still have the magnet on my fridge:
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2021
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  10. Kit'

    Kit' Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Oct 30, 1999
    I think the record was something like 20 minutes on the first page before it dropped off. People with super popular fics couldn’t see the problem because there stuff was constantly being replied to but it sucked for new writers and new fics. For a while we had better stats then fanfiction.net which was cool but daunting.

    Most of the modding stuff I dealt with was deleting inappropriate fics (naked flying yoda using his “lightsaber” - that’s just a regular Monday morning fic deletion) and trying to calm people down in the various flame wars. I gave it up because it was literally eating my life and because people treated me like a paid employee and not a volunteer (who was all of 18).

    It was still fun and there are people who were on the boards then that I miss.
     
  11. Jedi Knight Fett

    Jedi Knight Fett Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2014
    I haven’t been on here even close to as long as you but it’s the same. For some I know what they are still doing as I follow them off board but for others they were posting one day and then either slowly stopped without telling me or anyone or just one day went from 10 posts a day consistently to never posting again. You just hope that whatever they are doing now they are having fun doing it.
     
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  12. jcgoble3

    jcgoble3 Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Nov 7, 2010
    I never got one of those magnets! I did pass by the TF.N/JCF booth a few times there, but never picked one up. I was leading the Wookieepedia booth that year.
     
  13. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    Since I know some people here like Doctor Who, do I think you would find this interesting:

     
  14. DarthIshtar

    DarthIshtar Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2001
    I joined at 20 and just turned 40 three months ago. The archive was so new that JediGaladriel was my beta for my first three fics there. I remember so many episode 2 speculation fics that were, in some cases, better writing than the movies and a lot more emotionally even-keeled when it came to anakin skywalker. But I won Best Author on my 21st birthday, before there were eras and distinctions between new and old authors. :)
     
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  15. Kit'

    Kit' Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Oct 30, 1999
    My car broke down today.

    As in the engine just stopped dead.

    On the highway.

    In peak hour traffic.

    In the fast lane.

    Luckily there was no-one behind me and I managed to roll into the shoulder. A flurry of phone calls later and the tow truck came to get me. Because I broke down on a highway the Traffic Management people picked me up. The guy was only supposed to drop me to the nearest off-ramp, service station or park but he felt sorry for me (the nearest one of those was in a rather sketchy neighbourhood) so he dropped me and my car at my mechanic. It looks like the alternator is broken.
     
  16. DarthIshtar

    DarthIshtar Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2001
    @Kit' that’s frustrating. Glad they were able to look after you, though.
     
  17. Briannakin

    Briannakin Former Manager star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Feb 25, 2010
    That sucks Kit. Car problems are awful! But I'm glad the guy took you all the way to a mechanic.

    Can I just take a moment to celebrate my work victory? Because I work from home and no one at work will get this reference anyway:
    [​IMG]
    I've somehow ended up as a software set-up and website editor at work. I generally don't mind because I can usually figure it out, plus it means I get to spend days without talking to anyone (and whenever my boss asks me what I'm doing I can grumble back a very quick answer and then she leaves me alone). BUT sometimes things - particularly with this software I'm setting up to manage volunteers is just annoying. Anyways, a problem has been plaguing me for weeks (how to get our waivers downloadable on the online application) and I just figured it out and I am so happy.

    But theres no one around to gloat to, which sucks (but I did order myself lunch to celebrate).
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2021
  18. Jedi Knight Fett

    Jedi Knight Fett Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2014
    Wait really? No way! My car broke down yesterday in traffic. What a coincidence.
     
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  19. Kit'

    Kit' Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Oct 30, 1999
    They must have been in cahoots! It’s an international car conspiracy

    I think mine heard me thinking me about the fact it is 10 years old and when it was next going to break down and if we could afford to get a new one.
     
  20. Mistress_Renata

    Mistress_Renata Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 9, 2000
    That happened with my old car (which was very old). They told me it was the "torque solenoid converter valve," which I am still sure is something they made up based on an old Star Trek episode. Scary when it happens in the middle of traffic! Glad you were okay.

    I hear you, @Briannakin! It's so satisfying when it all falls into place.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2021
  21. jcgoble3

    jcgoble3 Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Nov 7, 2010
    I know exactly what that happy feeling feels like! Congratulations on solving it! :D
     
  22. DarthIshtar

    DarthIshtar Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2001
    So, Friday started with dad sending me an article on how people with certain comorbidities can now get vaccinated. I said, “thanks, but I still don’t qualify.” He called to mansplain to me what it means by morbidly obese and uncontrolled diabetes. I said again, “thanks, but I still don’t qualify.” Would not take me at my word that medical professionals have assessed my health and I am neither diabetic nor considered morbidly obese. Not that it’s any of his frigging business.

    An hour later, he called to say he’d talked to the Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake and I could get the vaccine there just for being part of a federally recognized tribe. He walked me through the paperwork I needed (ID, tribal ID, SSN card, insurance card, proof of residence) and arranged the time on Monday when he will drive me to and from the UICSL to get registered so I can get a vaccination appointment.

    I appreciate that he found me a place to get vaccinated, but the man pisses me off for wasting my morning with “I know it’s not something you want to talk about, but STOP LYING ABOUT YOUR WEIGHT!!!!!”
     
  23. CaraJinn

    CaraJinn Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Jan 8, 2018
    At least you have a very perisistent dad @DarthIshtar and the final outcome was good, but yeah...I can see that there are better ways to start the day than getting the messages you originally got from him.
    But hey, at least you get the vaccine and can breathe a bit more easily.

    *archiving word "mansplaining" for future use *
     
  24. DarthIshtar

    DarthIshtar Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2001
    My roommate doesn’t understand why I’m so eager to get vaccinated when I’d have to wait a couple of months longer otherwise. I’m going “I’ve got depression and PTSD and anything I can do to be less anxious, I’m going to take!”
     
  25. Briannakin

    Briannakin Former Manager star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Feb 25, 2010
    I'd give anything to have my dad around to mansplain something to me.

    That doesn't excuse your dad's behaviour but it's what I'm feeling right now.

    Here, the vaccine roll-out is basically just by age unless you have a SEVERELY immune-compromising disease (disability, unfortunately, doesn't count). So it's going to be August before my age bracket is called up. But I'm okay with waiting. I generally work from home, I'm relatively healthy, and with the most at-risk vaccinated at risk, things will ease up into the spring and summer anyway.