Question Broken Links

These are not broken links, nor should they be brought out for discussion. Unless the broken link name appears in a PUBLISHED list, either Gen 1, Gen 2, the Library, or Whateley WhatIf, and there are no announcements from an author then it is not intended for public consumption or discussion.

Posting titles that have not been announced by the authors gives spoilers that tend to push us to the leeward side of removing external access from wiki links to protect unpublished and/or unannounced material from premature announcement by readers.

If it is not in the Gen 1 Story List, the Gen 2 Story List, the Library or the WhatIf, and you can find no authorial reference to said titles or articles, please feel free NOT to announce them, report broken links publically or speculate on what they are. It is the purview of the Author to determine when the title, characters, spoilers et al should be released, or if there should be a surprise release.

Often many of the "broken links" are projects that are being privately discussed and/or reviewed and have not passed the canon collective's vetting process.

A lot of this could be, without warning "purged with fire" and never seen.

So please, do a fast forum search for announcements of titles by the author or release dates before posting them publically.

I know for a fact that Sunshine & Fury has never been announced as an upcoming story title, and the fact that people are fishing these up and publically posting them is beginning to irk me.

if you do a site search of Lex Blackstone and you get no returns on publically viewable articles, then odds are that Lex Blackstone is not a character or story that is up and ready for discussion. Please do not post unknown character/story/tag names publically. If you want to know if there's an oversight, send a canon author a PM.

Valentine wrote: Oddly though Lex Blackstone is whateleyacademy.net/index.php/forum/spec...19-dragonblade#13929 or crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Dragonblade and has his own origin story and is the costar of The Road to Whateley.

Means that certain parties forgot to add tags to their story.

If you find a tag that seems loose but applies to published stories (like the Dragonblade character) and post a link to the story and then ask someone to attach a relevant tag to that story, you're not going to get much flak.

It could be that it's just a new tag that should have been created for an older story. If that's the case, no harm, no foul.

But if you check the lex blackstone tag (and ok, he's an established character, you discover) but there's an accidental preview of a story entry called "The Diamondback Bomb Versus the jericho Butt" (this title will never happen unless another canon author gets a mad-on to make me wrong for the funzies) and the story title is a complete blank to all publicly available info sources, please do not discuss TDBVJB on a public thread.

Yes. As I keep telling people... enough so that I'm fed up with talking about these f'ing tags... there is a two tier system in place to keep unpublished/in progress stories out of sight of the public. The first line of 'defense' is that we can assign specific ranking access levels to each story that prevents it from being pulled up by those below that ranking level. No user of the site can access an article/page of the site that is restricted to an access level above what their account is set to allow. As such, non-registered users don't have access to some of the site gadgets. Registered users don't have access to the story writing editor or the article manager. WhatIF authors don't have access to the media upload tools or the canon story tracking modules. No one other than Warren and I have access to an entire onsite menu and an entire second site of administration features.

But occasionally, an author importing a story forgets to set their access level to restrict it to only canon authors and staff. And that's where the second line of 'defense' applies. Even if someone has forgotten to restrict access to a story... working/in progress canon stories are, by default, locked into a set of categories that don't have any menu links to them. They are only accessible via sidebar lists or the article manager IF the account has access to those lists. So even if I put up a story with a public access level... if its in the Gen 2 works in progress category, the only people who can see that its in the system are those people with ranks that show the Gen 2 canon tracking lists.

What the Tags system is bypassing is not the 'hard' access level restriction... but the 'soft' secondary line, that says "sure, its there, but you can't get there from here"... by giving you a means to get there from here (via a tag).

Also, because files are stored using names generated based on their titles... you can get titles in places even where you can't get the actual story, because it tries to load the story based on the title or article number, and then errors as 'inaccessible'... which is 'working as intended' from a technical standpoint... but a nuisance if you don't want people digging up story names early.


From 'our' end of things... we can prevent some of the problem by being more aggressive about handing the admin side of things - watching that stories get access level restricted asap instead of being lax about it. Asking authors to hold off tagging stories until they are publicly released. That sort of thing... but... let's be perfectly blunt here... using the means to find this data that resulted in these stories getting seen pre-release required methods that might not 'feel' like hacking... but are NOT intended methods of use for the site... and that makes them a violation of the posted policy agreement, hacking or not.

Malady wrote: But, this thread isn't just a communication to me, even though you're responding right after me...

*nods*