Archiving GSS! threads here
Talk Good Show Sir! — bad science fiction and fantasy covers
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1haydninvienna
As you may have noticed, I've converted the huge GSS! thread on The Doom that Came to Sarnath into two posts in a topic here. I learned a few things along the way.
First is that it's a PITA to do because LT will accept URLs but not much other HTML in a Talk post. (I think this is an anti-spam or security measure.) If you want bold or whatever, to make the commenters' handles stand out, you have to put all the open bold and close bold tags in by hand. Also, LT interprets an at-symbol followed by some text as a reference to an LT username and attempts to link to the probably non-existent profile. (I haven't found a way to include an at-symbol that shows as such; the standard character reference @ doesn't seem to work.) The removal of HTML means no comment numbers; there is a way to number comments within a post, but no obvious way to carry a series of numbers into a second post.
Best bit is that GSS! tags work, up to a point. A GSS! thread includes a list of tags, and if copied into an LT post they are searchable: for example The Doom ... has a tag "skulls-a-poppin". You can search LT for that tag. However, a GSS! thread always has an author tag, and a search for the author's name would return all the hits on LT. This is not as bad as it might seem; the left sidebar of the search results groups the hits by where they occur, and you can easily spot hits in Talk posts and then just scan the list for hits from this group.
Finally, to make the searching of tags useful, it seems preferable to keep to the general GSS practice of one thread per title. We can keep using the GSS! tags in the same way (although it would probably be helpful for GSS Admin to provide a list of the tags that are used, and for the rest of us to be sparing in creating new ones).
Update: I've just figured out how ro run a numbered list across two talk posts. You might get your comment numbers yet.
Update 2: My idea as to how to run a numbered list across 2 talk posts doesn't seem to work for posts of this length (works for short ones): I get to the end of Part 1 and the numbers look fine, but then it reverts to bullets in the next post. Damn.
First is that it's a PITA to do because LT will accept URLs but not much other HTML in a Talk post. (I think this is an anti-spam or security measure.) If you want bold or whatever, to make the commenters' handles stand out, you have to put all the open bold and close bold tags in by hand. Also, LT interprets an at-symbol followed by some text as a reference to an LT username and attempts to link to the probably non-existent profile. (I haven't found a way to include an at-symbol that shows as such; the standard character reference @ doesn't seem to work.) The removal of HTML means no comment numbers; there is a way to number comments within a post, but no obvious way to carry a series of numbers into a second post.
Best bit is that GSS! tags work, up to a point. A GSS! thread includes a list of tags, and if copied into an LT post they are searchable: for example The Doom ... has a tag "skulls-a-poppin". You can search LT for that tag. However, a GSS! thread always has an author tag, and a search for the author's name would return all the hits on LT. This is not as bad as it might seem; the left sidebar of the search results groups the hits by where they occur, and you can easily spot hits in Talk posts and then just scan the list for hits from this group.
Finally, to make the searching of tags useful, it seems preferable to keep to the general GSS practice of one thread per title. We can keep using the GSS! tags in the same way (although it would probably be helpful for GSS Admin to provide a list of the tags that are used, and for the rest of us to be sparing in creating new ones).
Update: I've just figured out how ro run a numbered list across two talk posts. You might get your comment numbers yet.
Update 2: My idea as to how to run a numbered list across 2 talk posts doesn't seem to work for posts of this length (works for short ones): I get to the end of Part 1 and the numbers look fine, but then it reverts to bullets in the next post. Damn.
2paradoxosalpha
LT can do better than a GSS author tag. By using double square brackets around the author's name, you can create an author touchstone, which will cause the thread to be included in "mentions" on the LT author page.
3haydninvienna
>2 paradoxosalpha: Fair point. I knew that, but I was thinking of searching. The author touchstone might work better though.
4paradoxosalpha
I also added the "About" to that topic. Those are sort of topic-level super tags.
5GSSex-noob
Huzzah!
6haydninvienna
As you may have noticed, I've just added another old GSS! thread.
I don't want to try to archive the whole of GSS! inside LT: apart from anything else, it would probably increase @timspalding's hosting bill beyond reason. I'm also far from sure that it would be within the LT terms of service. Finally, it would be a lot of work. But a few classics shouldn't be objectionable.
It prompts a thought though. Any community that lasts for more than five minutes tends to generate a kind of shared private language and a set of in-jokes. There's already a reference or two to Space Sheep*. Anyone from the larger LT community who wanders in here might be puzzled by them, and contrariwise anyone from the GSS! community who ventures into the Green Dragon (very much worth doing, I would say) may be warned to look out for the roombas, or reminded that there is always an elephant. Hey, it's Sunday morning — do you expect profundity on a rainy Sunday morning?
*Incidentally, I think I have a way of imitating the GSS! "Click here for full UNSHEEPED image" trick, but not just yet.
I don't want to try to archive the whole of GSS! inside LT: apart from anything else, it would probably increase @timspalding's hosting bill beyond reason. I'm also far from sure that it would be within the LT terms of service. Finally, it would be a lot of work. But a few classics shouldn't be objectionable.
It prompts a thought though. Any community that lasts for more than five minutes tends to generate a kind of shared private language and a set of in-jokes. There's already a reference or two to Space Sheep*. Anyone from the larger LT community who wanders in here might be puzzled by them, and contrariwise anyone from the GSS! community who ventures into the Green Dragon (very much worth doing, I would say) may be warned to look out for the roombas, or reminded that there is always an elephant. Hey, it's Sunday morning — do you expect profundity on a rainy Sunday morning?
*Incidentally, I think I have a way of imitating the GSS! "Click here for full UNSHEEPED image" trick, but not just yet.
7haydninvienna
Just done another one: Connoisseur's Science Fiction. This one was much, much easier than the Sarnath monster. I'm learning as I go: the book title and cover image are screen-captured together from the GSS! site. (I don't know where the paragraph after the publication date came from: it doesn't show on the GSS! site. Must have been buried in the HTML somehow.)
