Announcements

[Charybdis]

The Summer of Revelations

The brightenings grow longer and the weather more temperate as Telath’s suns shine down with the renewed ferocity of summer’s onset onto the ground beneath. Crops are welcomed back to life by its tender rays, the grasses have grown tall and strong to whip in the wind, and the breezes are sharp and bright across the skin. Scholars predict this summer to be slightly warmer than normal as a by-product of the ever too recent Longest Winter, but not disastrously so – just enough to balance out the cycle of the seasons.

What this Means: The new chronosynch spans three full months of Ulyris (a new month recently introduced by the Kalendryan Society), Ioannes, and Imperos of Era XVII Post-Fractum. (For more information: Calendar)

Holidays: Kestrel Tourney (Ioannes 1), Midsummer’s Day (Imperos 1), Memorianam (Imperos 15). (For more information: Holidays)

Duration: This chronosynch lasts from June 1, 2010 to August 31, 2010.

[Nimh]

Worldforge Workflow Rules
Originally Written by Tarot, Modified by Nimh

Purpose

The purpose of the Worldforge is to allow players and contributors to develop material for inclusion in the Lore. Once an article is approved and enters the Lore, it becomes canon and gains official game-wide recognition and acceptance. The main focus of the Worldforge is on two types of articles:

1) Developing new ideas and concepts or fleshing out existing ones;
2) Essays and other material written In-Character by a PC.

The Lore is one of two major Aelyrian information sources, the other being the Wiki. Unlike the Lore, adding material to the Wiki (which anyone can do) does not make it canon. The Wiki is an encyclopedic collection of information on the game world, written from a neutral point of view. It documents facts and events taken from the roleplayed forums and the Lore, and it is not really meant to contain original material. (Note: The definition and function of both the Wiki and Lore are under discussion.)

The Creative Team

The Worldforge is overseen by a branch of the Aelyria Contributor Program, the Creative Team. It exists to make sure that all players and contributors have all the tools and help they need to add new concepts and material to the game, while staying faithful to the spirit and continuity of the world of Aelyria.

• Creative Producer/Editor: Creative Producers are responsible for commenting on articles, offering suggestions in terms of how things fit into Aelyria as a whole, guidance on how to shape the article, making editing suggestions and pointing out problems in formatting. They will also be required to push articles ready for approval forward to be evaluated. Creative Producers make their home, so to speak, in the Worldforge forums. (Note: This position is currently under-going a name change.)

• Herald Editor: A Herald Editor would be in charge of approving new articles as they are submitted, tweaking things that need fixed, organizing/maintaining past Herald articles into a functional archive of history, and compiling pieces of current news from throughout Aelyria that have not been submitted to the Herald. This position is underdevelopment.

• Wiki Editor: Wiki Editors would be in responsible for monitoring the Wiki, moving things where they belong, tagging terms in articles so that they link to other articles, adding in nav boxes and books so that relevant articles are connected, as well as adding in new articles where needed. This position is underdevelopment.

• Creative Director: The Creative Director manages staffing and approves writeups for inclusion in the Lore with input from the Creative Team and the Management Team. The CD is also responsible for designing and maintaining the overall flow between both the Lore and the Wiki section, handling changes and updates as required.

Anyone interested in joining the team is welcome to review the announcement in the Be a Mod forum and apply via the Help Desk.

Disagreement with Creative Team members should be handled just like a similar situation involving any staff member - please contact a Creative Director and if anything else fails you can submit a Help Desk ticket.

The Basic WF Development Workflow

• Anyone is welcome to start a draft or a pre-draft discussion at any time. The moderators for that section will keep a watchful eye on the thread, offer input when required and make sure the environment remains friendly, unbiased and creative. All members of the Creative Team are expected to enforce the standards of the Code of Conduct in their domain.

• The title of your thread should contain the number of the current draft, ex. "Aelyrian Cakes [Second Draft]". Please include links to previous drafts. If it is a rewrite, this too should be noted in the title, ex: "Aelyrian Cakes [Rewrite: Second Draft]."

• Producers will strive to participate in every thread that is posted to their sections, providing input and feedback. While anyone is welcome to comment, remarks from the Creative Team for that section should be considered very carefully. Feel free to PM a Producer for your section if your writeup has not received attention for a week, or a Creative Director if no one is available.

• Producers from other sections are welcome to comment and contribute, but as guests they have the same authority as regular users and no decisional powers.

• Do not edit your writeup in major ways once you have posted it; instead, make a new draft. There is no limit to how many drafts you can post, and while it is common etiquette to wait at least a couple of days between drafts, a particularly active discussion could move at a faster pace. Please add a post to the old draft saying that a new one has been created, so moderators can close it and update their linkmap, if there is one.

• A Producer will notify you when a writeup is ready for Final Draft. It takes at least two weeks since the first draft before this permission can be granted. Two drafts are highly encouraged but no longer strictly required. A Final Draft is expected to be ready for inclusion. You are strongly encouraged to proofread the draft, and if you don't, be prepared for delays.
  
  Suggestions in Final Drafts are still welcome, but no longer expected to be addressed by the author unless the author wants to, in which case they will announce that further development is necessary, and the Final Draft will become a normal draft. The purpose of this guideline is to prevent endless development due to "it would be nice if..." suggestions cropping up near the end.

• A Creative Producer always has the power to refuse or postpone submission as the result of a valid concern expressed by a poster, and can send the writeup back into development.

• A writeup remains in Final Draft form for at least one week. The Creative Producer will then either submit it for evaluation, or send it back to development - in the latter case, the reasons that led to this choice must be clearly listed and motivated. Gameplay issues, concerns raised by contributors, continuity problems that had not been perceived before; these are all causes of non-submission.

• Once submitted, please allow one week for the evaluation process. The evaluation will be conducted as follows:
  • The article will be placed up for review and comment by the Creative Team and other staff members for the duration of a week.
  • At the end of seven days, the article will be reviewed by the Creative Director for a final decision, taking into consideration the opinions of commenting staff members.
  • Once a decision has been reached, the author of the write-up will be notified as to the status.
  There are three possible outcomes to such a decision:
  • Acceptance - The write-up becomes canon and can be added to the Lore by the Creative Producer
  • Rejection - It is sent back to the drawing board together with the reasons why it cannot be accepted in its current form
  • Suppression - Like Rejection, but further development is forbidden; used in particularly serious cases, like e.g. copyright infringement.
  In some cases, for any number of reasons, it may take more than two weeks for articles to be approved.

• If an article has been approved, Creative Producers will then send out private messages to Game Masters and other staff members in the game who might make use of the write-up in their cities and surrounding environs.

Other WF Workflows

• Edits. Anyone can start a workflow to perform an edit. The reasons why the edit is deemed necessary should be clearly listed with the draft. While it is a good practice to ask the original author first, in many cases this is not possible. If the original author is available but does not agree that their article is in need of an edit (or if the nature of the edit is controversial), a pre-draft discussion should take place to reach consensus. In the end, the Creative Producer decides whether and to what extent the edit is necessary if no agreement can be reached. When in doubt, a Help Desk ticket may provide a ruling.
  
  Once the initial phase is concluded, the edit works just like any normal WF workflow. If accepted, the editing contributor(s)'s name is appended to the list of credits for that writeup.

• Legacy. A legacy writeup is an old writeup that has been sitting in the WF and whose author is no longer active. After six months of confirmed inactivity, anyone can pick up the legacy writeup and resume work on it after asking the Creative Producer for permission to do so. It then becomes a normal WF workflow and the new contributor takes responsibility for it. Both contributors will be listed in the credits, roughly sorted by the amount of work done.

• Clarification. These kind of threads may be started by anyone and are not aimed at producing writeups (not directly, at least). These are the WF equivalent to a Roundtable in the Symposium and are rather freeform, though writeup proposals may stem from them. They are moderated by a member of the Creative Team.

[Nimh]

Article Standards for the Worldforge

Due to an increasing use of color and frames in Worldforging, some of it good and some of it a little...extreme...we have come to the conclusion that the site would be best served by coming to a standardized look for any and all articles currently in or being reviewed for the Lore section. Any and all articles that make use of coding that lends color to the article (such as the Frame or Color codes) will be asked to strip their coding down. An article will not be reviewed for approval until these have been removed (this does not go for articles that have already been submitted for approval, although the coding will be removed prior to being placed into the Lore, if approved).

The following tags should no longer be used in Worldforge articles:

Frames: [frame][/frame]
Color: [color][/color]
Glow: [glow][/glow]

Acceptable codes of a non-colorful nature can be found on the BB Code List.

This decision was made after reviewing several factors: Creativity should be displayed through the content, not the coding; Colorful fonts may or may not show up in a readable manner on the different forum skins for the website; The use of frames and colors has become distraction from the content. While I can understand the appreciation of a colorful set up, it is simply not conducive to the direction of our content that we wish to take at this time.

Also, I would like to remind folk about the following:

Images - All images must be approved for use on the website, receiving express permission from their source. They should be placed in a location on Aelyria itself and not stored off-site, using either the Gallery or the Albums in a person's account. Images should never be hot-linked, meaning they should not be linked directly to the site from which you are taking them, as it is a manner of bandwidth theft.

The use of images in articles should be kept to a reasonable number. That is to say, please do not overwhelm the text with numerous and/or large pictures.

Linking Off-Site - Please do not link to off-site locations in your Worldforge articles. This not only goes for images, but music and other websites as well. Everything in your article should be explained through your own personal text and not through linking to a demonstration.