
Tags: Copyright
Switzerland 
2½ years ago, I listed old school fanzines I knew. Does the Scribe of Orcus still exist? I guess it was never officially cancelled but these days other publications have sprung up.
Four of them are available via Lulu! I usually wait for a coupon that offers free ground shipping and order then. If I don’t do that, I’ll have to pay an extra 50% for shipping to Switzerland.
Fight On is my favorite of the lot. I contribute to this one. You’ll get between 80 and 120 pages of content four times a year. It is published by two pseudonymous persons called Calithena and Ignatius Umlaut. The reason I like it so much is that Fight On is an eclectic mix of things, much of it clearly the work of referees like myself—it’s the kind of thing that looks like it was written by people like me for people like me. The magazine tries to cater to the entire Old School Renaissance with an occasional Tunnels & Trolls or Tékumel article. Most of it is for old school D&D with DC (defense class) being the equivalent of AC (descending armor class).
Knockspell is a smaller, cleaner fanzine, mostly for Swords & Wizardry published by Matt Finch. I bought several of the issues in print (#1–#3, #6).
One of the reasons for buying Knockspell in addition to Fight On are the Formalhaut articles by Gabor Lux which appear in both magazines. I love them!
Another thing of note is that Knockspell uses the Open Gaming License whereas Fight On provides no license for its readers. Unfortunately, many of the Knockspell articles will say This article contains no Open Game Content other than spell names, magic item names, and terminology derived from the game rules or The rules described in this article are Open Game Content, and the remainder is Product Identity, thereby negating the benefit to readers.
Oubliette is published by a small circle of people around Peter Regan and seems to target Labyrinth Lord players. I’ve recently read a review saying that the author appreciated the distinct voice. I loved the crude and direct artwork by The Marg. All of the artwork done by the same artist certainy strengthens it’s unique voice.
I must confess, however, that I never really sat down and read through the compilation of issues 1–4 I had bought. I can’t really tell you why. Somehow there was always something that seemed more appealing. I keep meaning to return to it, but it just sits there on my shelf…
The compilation I own uses the OGL and declares some names to be Product Identity. Everything else is presumed Open Gaming Content even though it never says that explicitly (failing section 8 of the license).
NOD is published by a single person, John M. Stater. It is advertized as being “compatible with Swords & Wizardry and other old school games.” There is much less art in the book, some of it old public domain images, some of it photos used with a Creative Commons license. I bought it for the Asian hex crawl in issue #8 (and bought #7 in order to have something else to compare it to). I really liked the previews I was seeing on his site and I also liked later previews of his hexcrawl in hell.
Once I got the issues, however, I ended up not reading them because they were large and didn’t seem to be immediate applicable. I’d have to start a new campaign in one of the hex crawls! Much like the Wilderlands of High Fantasy I would then use the hex descriptions as a seed to create adventures for players living in the area and build from there.
The license used by NOD is the OGL with very strong restrictions: basically only new spells and new classes are completely Open Gaming Content. Everything else is either Product Identity or only partically open, eg. only the magic item names are open.

We’re truly living in a time of old school plenty – I am overwhelmed by all this stuff! It’s awesome and I think it works much better for me than the beautiful last copies of Dungeon magazine. Those magazines were so polished, they always looked out of my league. These fanzines, on the other hand, look much more like the stuff I might have written myself. It encourages me to contribute, it encourages me to run my own stuff instead of longing for the professional editing and the color explosion of fantastic art. And yet, it’s jst as useful at my gaming table.
Ironically, I want these magazines to succeed, I want to read them all, I want to use them all, but it seems to me that I don’t actually need all this text. It takes longer to read all these fanzines than it takes me to write up new stuff that is truly mine. I feel conflicted.
My suggestion to any readers is therefore to look through the free issues and figure out which fanzine you like the best and just buy one of them. For me, that’s Fight On! but as you can see I don’t really have any good reasons for picking one over the others.
Also, I’d love to see more permissive licenses. I hate hate hate extremely broad declarations of Product Identity. You got an entire game for free and now you’re being stingy with your own contributions? Gah!

And there’s more!
Loviatar is very small, written by Christian Walker, and mailed directly to subscribers. He says “Getting cool mail is so rare. Bills suck!” No Lulu!
Encounter is an electronic fanzine. I’ve read through the first two editions and enjoyed them a lot. Unfortunately I’m not much of a PDF reader—I prefer print if it’s going to be used at the table and when I’m using my tablet, I prefer to waste time reading the blogs, Google+ and Twitter. (If you’re looking for some old school blogs, take a look at my Old School RPG Planet which collects a lot of them.)
Interestingly enough, Oubliette appears to be British and Encounter appears to be Australian.
As it turns out, now that I check their website, the last issue was published in April 2011. Oops!
Oddities came and went in 2010… Did Unknown Sagas ever make it?
Do you know of any other fanzines? I know that Pathways is a fanzine for Pathfinder players.
I heard that Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor is working on another little fanzine in the Loviathar style called The Manor.

Updates:
Compare this to the situation back in 2008.
Tags: RPG
Old School 
Comments on 2012-03-04 Old School Fanzines
Tim Shorts Thanks for the mention Alex. Been plugging away at it and hope to have the first issue out in a couple of weeks. The one magazine I also liked was Oddities. I think I am misspelling it. But thought that was another good one.
– Tim Shorts 2012-03-05 03:12 UTC
Tim Shorts Sorry Alex, I see that you did mention it. I am going to blame my pup attacking me while I was reading for my misread.
– Tim Shorts 2012-03-05 03:16 UTC
I love the image of bloggers trying to comment while being attacked by pups! Pups for the win. 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-05 13:06 UTC
I think Oerth Journal (Greyhawk) and Star Frontiersman Magazine qualify…
– Lee B 2012-03-05 23:51 UTC
Thanks for the pointers! That reminds me of Infinite Stars…
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-06 08:12 UTC
Just found this: Back to the Dungeon Vol 1 Must add it to the main page.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-18 22:01 UTC
Alexey Fotinakes Thanks for the mention, Alex. Issue 3 of the Wizards Mutants Laser Pistols! fanzine is out now and No 4 should be coming out sometime in January.
– Alexey Fotinakes 2012-12-11 20:51 UTC
AlexSchroeder Excellent news! I’m still hoping for Fight On! to make a comeback…
— finding other magazines to be thriving is welcome news. 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-12-11 23:41 UTC
Alexey Fotinakes I heartily agree with you in regards to Fight On! Such a fabulous magazine…I can’t bear to think of it as gone. I’m still hoping for a return, and for that “big book of random tables” Cal was planning.
– Alexey Fotinakes 2012-12-14 06:29 UTC
AlexSchroeder Another long list: Old School Zines.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-02-19 08:02 UTC
I want to like Pathfinder. It’s large, it has adventure paths with long stories, it has more traditional modules, it has background material, colorful art – and yet the products are often awfully long. I used to appreciate that, but these days I often think that the material takes me longer to read than to think up myself. I’m still subscribed to their adventure path line, however, and I still listen to 3.5 Private Sanctuary.
In Known Direction 31 they discussed “interesting” encounters and Ryan says: “Basically if every player feels like they have something they can do on their turn, and not just something they can do but something that they’ve put into their character, some part of their character build that they can use, then they’re going to feel better about it.”
I feel torn. On the one hand, I absolutely understand it. On the other hand, this leads to “my precious encounter design” and railroads and quantum ogres (otherwise players will miss on these carefully designed encounters). I prefer games where as a player I have more freedom, where builds are not that important, where encounters can be incluenced by player ingenuity at the table and don’t server to reward choices made during character creation.
Comments on 2012-03-05 The Bane of Character Builds
-C Not to bother you, but I think you might be talking about a quantum ogre, not a phantom one. http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/search/label/series%20%28Quantum%20Ogre%29
– -C 2012-03-06 05:06 UTC
AlexSchroeder You’re right. I’ll add that link.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-06 08:00 UTC
I’ve started tinkering with the CSS again. No more secret theme switching by clicking on my face up there. 
I’m going for black and white and the default blue for all links. The previous classification for site links, links to sister sites, links to Wikipedia and all other links didn’t really work with all the redirections I had implemented. Thus, be gone!
I’m sticking to Garamond as my favorite font even though I must admit it looks absolutely horrible when viewed on Windows without Clear Type. Oh well! Most people will be reading the site via a feed reader anyway, I guess.
I’ll also try to stick to a larger than average font-size. I haven’t decided whether I should be using Google Web Fonts.
Let me know if there is something you’d like to see changed. 
Comments on 2012-03-07 Tinkering with the CSS
Andreas Gohr How does the referrer thingy at the bottom of the post work? The two pages linked seem not to link to this post?
Regarding styling: I’d prefer a non-serif font.
– Andreas Gohr 2012-03-08 10:14 UTC
AlexSchroeder The referrer thing works as follows: if a visitor to the wiki has referrer information, the wiki fetches this page and searches for a link to the page. If that works, it remembers the link. This means that eventually referrals expire if nobody ever follows them. Normally this works very well. Some sites such as Blogspot offer users a blog-roll. As far as I understand it, users will then see the n most recently updated entries or a random selection. Either way, by the time other visitors try and check the referral, it’s no longer being displayed.
If you check Self:action=refer you will notice that at the moment the authors of Dreams of Mythic Fantasy, The City of Iron and Troll and Flame seem to have me listed on their blog-roll. All of them are Blogspot blogs. 
As for sans-serif, try this link. (Your preference is set in a cookie.) Feel free to switch back.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-08 11:46 UTC
AlexSchroeder For Pierre and others who preferred the old look: Try this! switch to the Red Beige theme and switch back to the default theme
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-23 15:28 UTC
Twenty years ago I kissed my wife Claudia for the first time. Best decision ever.

Comments on 2012-03-10 Twenty Years Ago
Auf Grund von Claudias Rezension hab ich mir nun beide Bücher von Jo Zybell gekauft. Ich berichte dann. 
– Mom 2012-03-15 16:34 UTC
Wahnsinn! 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-15 22:06 UTC
Recently Calithena of Fight On asked on Dragonsfoot: Do any of you have your campaigns on line?
I said:
There’s more… There must be at least two short Burning Wheel campaigns on that site (Burning Six, Campaign:Krythos). And a Mongoose Traveller game that switched to Diaspora (Campaign:Kaylash). And a wiki I used for my DM notes when running the Kurobano campaign (Campaign:Attaxa). And a Forgotten Realms campaign using D&D 3.5 (Sohn des schwarzen Marlin). And another D&D 3.5 sandbox (Campaign:Grenzmarken).
I totally recommend keeping notes online! 
(I run the Campaign Wiki site which explains why I’m so enthusiastic about it.)
It has been a year since my last podcast list. I still walk to work and back, each trip taking maybe half an hour. I enjoy listening to podcasts while I walk.
RPG:




Humanities:




Music:



Any podcasts you are listening to you’d like to recommend?
I’d also like to promote the One Page Dungeon Contest 2011 via podcasts. Should I just mail a host for each of the RPG shows I enjoy and ask them?
Comments on 2012-03-16 Podcast Update
Excellent- thanks for the list. I just started trying to listen to some of these.
– Anonymous 2012-03-16 15:19 UTC
http://www.dw.de/dw/0,,5929,00.html bücherwelt.de podcast
früher auch mal waren einige artikel der zeit gratis, aber nun muss man sie zahlen und bis dezember http://www.franceinter.fr/podcasts/liste-des-emissions… aber seit die eine neu app gemacht haben, geht nix mehr 
hab mich mal bei bbc eingeklinkt… danke für den tipp
– mom 2012-03-18 21:27 UTC
ooops warum diese komischen buchstaben… schreiben euf ne mac tastatur… ist das der grund?
– mom 2012-03-18 21:27 UTC
Nein, ist wohl ein Bug in der Software! 
Wenn man die Seite nachbearbeitet, kann man das flicken, was ich nun getan habe. 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-18 21:48 UTC
When I was running D&D 3.5, I dreaded the important fights. One of my players was a powergamer, a chess player, an optimizer, a wargamer – and I am none of that. Thus, my monsters never used their abilities to the fullest and even if I took shortcuts such as “all buffs cast when players appear on the scene” I was at a loss. I didn’t want to outsmart my players, I didn’t want to outwit them! And if I just added more monsters, the system was so fragile that the characters of my non-optimizing players died again and again.
I was reminded of this as our HARP GM recently said that he wanted to play the opposition as smart possible. I thought to myself that this was not how I wanted to play the opposition and I started wondering. I think the answer is that if I try to outwit my players, then I’m being an antagonist instead of a referee. I’m not good at it and I don’t enjoy it.
The old school solves this issue for me: there aren’t too many maneuvers to make, thus fights aren’t full of tactical finesse and when I add a few monsters, consequences are not as dire. Furthermore, I use reaction tables and morale rules to determine the behavior of the opposition. I watch, from the detached position of a referee, as the opposition is run by dice. If I want to spice things up, I can give the monsters special abilities or add traps to locations – but I never need to actively outwit my players.
I think this passivity helps me enormously.
Tags: RPG
Old School 
Comments on 2012-03-20 Not Smart Enough
Jan Yep, being a gm is kind of schizophrenic. When you write down the adventure and choose monsters you are the referee. But during fights you are not the referee. You goal must be to try to kill the players with what carefully chosen and hopefully balanced opposition you have. It’s hart but to have tactically challenging fights that’s what you need to do. And if you don’t wanna have them you power gamer player might become pretty bored over time. At least I would and I’m the chess guy, too.
– Jan 2012-03-21 07:38 UTC
AlexSchroeder Absolutely! I’ve also had players ask “That was it!? Where are the real enemies??”
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-21 10:15 UTC
Stefan As a player, I enjoy encountering opponents whose actions feel “real” and not like in a bad computer game. Is outwitting your players the same as letting your NPCs act “naturally” within the boundaries of what they can know?
If you roll morale checks during combat, you have to decide on the chance of the monsters fleeing. The antagonist makes this decision. Only then can the referee roll the dice.
– Stefan 2012-03-24 21:46 UTC
AlexSchroeder Actually, in old school D&D, the referee doesn’t decide that. The monster manual has a morale score for all the monsters listed. I find this really helps me get into the mindset of a referee.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 23:38 UTC
Stefan But you still have to pick the monsters and design the encounter. Or is that process too far removed from the game at the table because it happens when you prepare the adventure?
– Stefan 2012-03-25 09:56 UTC
AlexSchroeder I’ve never seen itself as a conscious decision to disassociate myself from the setting, but I think this is exactly what happens. For the sandbox, I pick some broad ideas (“here be dragons”, “darves fight giants over here” and so on) and place those on the map in remote locations. Closer to the starting base, I pick smaller themes (“vampires in a barrow hill”, “lizard men warring on kobolds”), and finally, I write a few random encounter tables with monsters that make sense (“2d6 soldiers, 1d6 merchant and guards, lizard men 2d6, 2d6 kobolds, 1d6 dwarves” and maybe something exotic or very dangerous like a giant or a dragon). I will also place their lairs where it makes sense and have a rough idea of how many there are. When the party gets to a lair and actually starts hostilities, I can still figure that there will be 5d6 kobolds or something like that. This gives me the structure where I can roll some dice at the table (1 in 6 of an encounter per day and per night) without having to pick the exact opposition.
At the same time I will place One Page Dungeons on the map and pick some adventure modules, or write up one or two of my own, and place them on the map. These are often “appropriate” for the current party level in that they are either for low level characters or if they are large dungeons or megadungeons (hundreds of locations) they will at least start out with locations appropriate for low level characters. It is then up to the players to decide where they want to push further in, looking for greater rewards.
All of this, I think, supports the notion that it is not I who directly picks the challenges my players will face but it is the players that will pick the average challenge level based on the risks they are willing to take. They can do this because they can get some information before getting involved (“there be dragons” or “travel is no longer safe because the lizards are on a war path”).
This is getting pretty far from the original question of “I’m too stupid to play a tactical game against my players” but it’s the same idea. Just as I try to avoid having to pick the tactics the opposition will use I will try to avoid picking the opposition itself. Instead, I rely on tables and the roll of dice in order to not feel responsible for the results and I limit myself to being a referee.
At least that’s the current old school ideal I’m striving for. The same does not apply for my Solar System RPG or Pendragon games. 
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-25 10:27 UTC
Stefan I was thinking of adventure path-like adventures with a story to be told while it seems you had a sandbox in mind. In my view, there is a fundamentally different design process behind these two. But this really leads too far away from the original topic.
– Stefan 2012-03-25 13:18 UTC
Der Blog Karneval vom März dreht sich um Spielvorbereitung. Hier ein paar Beispiele, wie das bei mir so aussieht. Klicken für grössere Bilder!
Regionale Übersicht für die Spieler:
Kleiner Dungeon:
Stadtabenteuer:
Wildnisabenteuer:
Begegnungen mit Monstern oder NPCs:
Mit der Zeit wollen die Spieler nachvollziehen können wie lange es dauert, von A nach B zu reisen:
Ich mag solche Hex Karten wirklich sehr gerne, um meine Kampagne besser zu verankern:
Primitiver Dungeon für einen unbedeutenden Ort:
Ich finde, Karten sind ideale “Props” – es ist immer wieder schön, bei den Gegnern eine Karte zu finden:
Auch Briefe sind immer wieder schön:
Vorbereitung mit noch mehr D&D 3.5 Stats (Drachen und so):
Vorbereitung für eine Rede, die ein NPC schwingen soll:
Kleine Skizze für mich, damit ich dann besser improvisieren kann:
Auch lustig: Karte und Idee aus einem anderen Abenteuer klauen, neu zeichnen und so vereinfachen, dass ich es am Tisch auch wirklich brauchen kann, ohne tausend mal hin und her blättern zu müssen.
Erste Versuche mit dem One Page Dungeon Konzept:
(Komplettes Abenteuer hier: CW:DungeonMaps/Gnomish Village with Ogres)
Etwas ausgefeilterer Dungeon:
Vorbereitung für ein Road Trip Abenteuer:
Langsame Hinwendung zu Indie Spielen, hier Spirit of the Century:
Traveller Abenteuer. Wie man sieht, liebe ich es, Karte, Text und Stats auf eine Seite unter zu bringen.
Diesmal wieder D&D 3.5:
Handout für Spieler:
Andere Kampagne, Handout für Spieler:
Andere Kampagne, Handout für Spieler:
Schatzkarte, die man einem dubiosen Typen abkaufen konnte:
Vorbereitung für Solar System RPG:
(Hintergrund hierfür auf Englisch)
So, das war’s!
Diskussion hier oder auf dem rsp-blogs Forum.
Tags: RSP 
Comments on 2012-03-20 Spielvorbereitung
Diskussion hier oder auf dem rsp-blogs Forum.
(TL;DR: People that don’t like the wiki as it is ought look at the official Emacs documentation instead. I wrote this so that I’d have something to link to in the future. This post was inspired by EmacsWiki:2012-03-20.)
Every year or so, I read about suggested changes to the Emacs Wiki. The complaints are the same, year after year.
The solutions invariably have nothing to do with the problem.
Why are these suggestions not helpful?
The first problem is the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change. Yes, the wiki is badly organized and many of the pages are outdated. Changing the wiki engine, the backend or the formatting rules will not change this, however.
The backend used by the wiki engine can influence performance and resource use, it can the software harder or easier to maintain and backup – but it will not induce somebody to edit a messy page and fix it.
The second problem is the mistaken belief that moderation can be commanded. You can complain about bad editing and a lack of moderation all day. But since nobody is paying people to do a boring job, we must rely on obsessive compulsive people to fix typos and tag pages.
Maybe we could attract more people by gamifying the experience—offer rewards, badges, scores. But Stack Overflow already does this. It’s the best social question answering machine currently known. The wiki doesn’t need to imitate something better. The wiki needs to do what it does best. We’ll come to that.
The third problem is the mistaken belief that quality control and volunteers go well together. Just compare Wikipedia and Citizendium and consider the animosity generated by Deletionism on Wikipedia. How will you encourage authors to contribute if you are telling them that their contributions are lacking the quality you are looking for instead of simply accepting their text and working on it?
You fight spam, you rework text occasionally, you encourage others, you welcome newbies, you lead by example. That’s how you lead.
An abrasive personality, radical change involving a lot of work—those are not the tools you are looking for.
Let me return to the issue of commanding change. Things people have said:
The critics can be unhappy about it all they want, and they can complain about it all they want—but in the end, one needs to understand the forces at work, here. There is no chain of command.
It works just like a free software project. If it doesn’t scratch someone’s itch, nobody is going to add it. I think it’s a fundamental issue with our business model: there is no pay for boring stuff. Plus, documentation is of no direct use for anything—unlike code. Thus, people are mostly motivated to keep their own code and its documentation up to date. I don’t think there is anything we can do about that. That’s why the Emacs Wiki Mission Statement does not mention organization and quality. It cannot be commanded.
Once we accept that this is the sand upon which we are building our house, we necessarily need to scale down our expectations. Personally, I think the wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation, Stack Overflow, the FAQ, the newsgroups, the mailing lists, and IRC. It’s certainly nowhere near the quality of organization and writing that the Emacs documentation has—and I don’t think this is the right medium to aim for this level of quality. I think the people willing to invest that amount of energy to write quality stuff ought to be writing the real Emacs documentation—and they probably are.
What remains are the people using Emacs Wiki for their own pet projects, questions asked, answers given, sometimes organized, sometimes rewritten, sometimes linked to the rest of the site.
Wikipedia works because of its universal appeal. When I added an image to an obscure Indian temple we visited when I was staying in Mysore, the photo was terrible. But it was a start, and enough people cared about the page and it grew, and it found people to tend it, and now it’s big and beautiful.
There just aren’t enough Emacs users and authors out there and the best of us will be contributing to the official Emacs documentation. The wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation and the mailing lists. Lower your expectations.
Given all that, why does the wiki exist at all?
When I started it, I had several reasons:
I think this last point bears consideration: I was creating pages or adding information to pages because it was pertinent on IRC. An index, linking to the page, categorization, returning to the page later and reworking it, all these quality related tasks were not pertinent on IRC. All I needed was a pastebin that I could go back to and rewrite if I felt like it. Often I did not—and I still don’t.
The wiki being on the web, updated every now and then, with pertinent answers to specialized questions, unorganized and raw, ended up being a good resource for the search engines out there. These search engines bring new people to the site. People that don’t understand how wikis work in general and how this wiki grew to be where it is in particular. They are shocked. So many pages outdated! Such a mess in style and quality!
I think those people are better served reading the official documentation. They don’t want this mess, they don’t benefit from it’s loose rules, they don’t understand how cool it is to have a site with no login required. They are better served elsewhere.
I’m sure that one day the Emacs Wiki will have become irrelevant. But just like the old newsgroups never disappeared entirely, so will the wiki transform into something else and remain part of our information landscape.
Perhaps one of the Emacs Wiki critics will one day set up an alternate site, pull all the pages (more than 8500 pages last time I checked), extract the quality content—or rewrite it from scratch—and produce something better. Perhaps they will build an organization that can keep the quality up, encourage new authors to join, provide more value to their readers. But I don’t think complaining about the existing Emacs Wiki is a step in the right direction. Build it, and they will come—elsewhere.
Comments on 2012-03-24 How Emacs Wiki Works
> the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change
Well, simply having a “talk” page for each wiki page (with a big link at the top) would let people have conversations about those pages without cluttering them up. And having an actual, complete revision history would help someone figure out what happened to a completely messed-up page. But EmacsWiki doesn’t seem to have those things. Its technology is too primitive to reasonably support – much less encourage – a workable society.
> the mistaken belief that moderation can be commanded
As Wikipedia has amply demonstrated, there are plenty of obsessive-compulsive people online. If anything, moderation needs to be limited.
– SeanO 2012-03-24 03:44 UTC
Bozhidar One of the critics already started an alternative wiki - http://wikemacs.org 
Other than that - I’m with SeanO on this one. And with 8500 pages or so - it easier to save the worthwhile articles than to revisit all the material.
– Bozhidar 2012-03-24 05:48 UTC
AlexSchroeder Sean, if the lack of a complete revision history is what held you back from reworking and reorganizing, then I guess you’re right. I am keeping all the logs, but discarding all the older revisions after two weeks and never felt the lack.
The addition of Talk pages was discussed a while ago—it was one of the items on the suggestions page—but at the time we had two votes in favor and two votes against them. Nobody else seemed to care. I’ll be surprised if their mere existence improves the pages. But I guess we’ll see, now. Good luck to you all!
After a quick look at the site I’ll suggest that you should add licensing terms as quickly as possible. As it stands, you cannot copy anything from Emacs Wiki. That would require a copyleft license.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 07:16 UTC
SeanO Alex – I’d say my laziness and your sneering condescension were greater obstacles. But if I don’t check in for more than 2 weeks (quite likely, given how little time I have for Emacs these days), I’d still like to be able to see what happened if something I cared about (e.g. the Perl page or my homepage) went bad. (How much, to an order of magnitude Euros and hours’ work, would it cost you to keep a complete revision log, by the way?)
I guess the Talk page issue came and went in a revision window when I didn’t have time to hang out here.
I’m also tired of your pseudo-legal threats toward the content of the wiki (which is under GPL2, not GFDL).
(This comment is protected by the GFDL, I guess. Whatever that means.)
– SeanO 2012-03-24 08:14 UTC
AlexSchroeder I wonder where you felt my sneering condescension. Perhaps in my replies to people I felt were trying to tell me what to do in my free time and with my money? I also don’t think I threatened you in any way. Perhaps you missed the problems I had with changes to the Emacs Wiki license in its early days. I was trying to help you or Bozhidar make the same mistake.
The logs are there for all to see if you follow the links. Here’s the the SiteMap history, for example. Keeping all the old revisions would cost me nothing – it’s simply a setting. I prefer it this way. As I said, I think keeping the old revisions provides no benefit and adds a number of small drawbacks such as needing administrators to permanently hide particular revisions that contain material deemed problematic from a legal perspective. As it stands, I can undo these edits and with time, they are gone. Another issue is that I like the idea of a right to be forgotten. The original C2 wiki kept no revisions at all. I think that the only reason old revisions need to be kept at all is peer review and anti-spam and anti-vandalism measures. For those tasks, a small time window is sufficient. After all, wiki pages are not code. We don’t need to look through the history of a page to find when bugs were introduced and by whom.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 10:30 UTC
P.S.: EmacsWiki:WikiDownload links to a CVS repository of the source files hosted on the wiki, a subversion repo with daily snapshots of all the wiki pages, and a new, up to date git repo of all the pages with full history. I guess in a way my preference regarding the right to be forgotten is already moot since deleted stuff can be pulled out of the archives. This just hides deleted info from casual visitors.
PhilHudson Excellent riposte, Alex. We who criticize the wiki should pay attention. I would like to thank you for this consistently useful resource and your dedication. I certainly don’t detect any sneering on your part. Having said that, I do think there are a lot of real and fixable problems with the wiki, the worst being the hosting of code with neither “proper” SCM nor automatic notification of changes. Once you’ve used LaunchPad and (especially) github, this is just not tolerable. So I’m going to see what if anything I can do to help any new project.
– PhilHudson 2012-03-24 11:29 UTC
AlexSchroeder I see the problem! I think people like me don’t feel bad about keeping code that consists of a single file on the wiki because we usually don’t think of these files as requiring maintenance. After all, that’s how gnu.emacs.sources used to work. The wiki has the benefit of providing a stable URL, but the process remains essentially the same: post & forget, possibly have discussions with other people via email, followed by another post & forget.
To me, creating a separate project on Savannah or Source Forge is an unacceptable overhead for files like EmacsWiki:rcirc-color.el or EmacsWiki:rcirc-controls.el. But if somebody else felt like taking those files, putting them up on some other site – excellent! At first, color-theme.el was hosted on Emacs Wiki. Eventually somebody took it, moved it elsewhere, and started a real project. Great!
I still think that the Emacs Wiki can act as a low barrier-to-entry incubator for all those small little files that need a place on the web. I don’t read gnu.emacs.sources anymore, and I don’t think many other people do. At the same time, I think there still are a lot of people without their own web pages out there. They can’t post code on Facebook or Google+ and I imagine uploading code to Wordpress and Blogspot sites is also unwieldy. For all those people, the Emacs Wiki offers an alternative. It’s a bit better than gnu.emacs.sources and Lisppaste but a far cry from a software forge.
If people would take popular code from the wiki to a forge, repackage it as a real project, that would be great.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 12:11 UTC
Phil, I just remembered EmacsWiki:Git repository. Maybe that helps? I know Jonas is very enthusiastic about it and has been pestering me for weeks when I dragged my feet.
I’m sure he’d appreciate help or some nice words.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 19:07 UTC
“the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change”
Github was an example of technology that brought about a change in social behaviour.
– Phil Jackson 2012-03-26 12:18 UTC
Edward O'Connor Excellent post, Alex. Long live the EmacsWiki! 
– Edward O'Connor 2012-03-26 23:35 UTC
AlexSchroeder Thanks, hober!
Phil, regarding Github: I’m not much of a github user. I see that git and github bring a lot of relevant new features to the table. Compared with other version control systems they facilitate forking on a grand scale. Do you feel that using Mediawiki introduces a similar set of new features that will revolutionize how wiki pages are edited and organized? I don’t see it, which is why I cannot imagine that Xah’s and Bozhidar’s idea of switching to Mediawiki will in fact help solve the quality issues they have with Emacs Wiki.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-03-28 15:32 UTC
AlexSchroeder Just saw this: The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later.
– AlexSchroeder 2013-01-22 11:57 UTC
Spring has come. Temperatures reaching 20C, the sun is shining, bumblebee queens are out searching for a new nest and hayfever has been rearing its ugly nose.
What: Snow by Orhan Pamuk
When: 21 March, 19:30 – RSVP on Meetup (optional
)
Where: Bistro Lochergut
Back cover description:
As the snow begins to fall, a journalist arrives in the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border. The city he finds is a troubled place - there’s a suicide epidemic among its young women. Islamists are poised to win the local elections, and the head of the intelligence service is viciously effective. Soon the growing blizzard cuts off the outside world and the stage is set for a terrible and desperate act.
Amazon says:
The story encapsulates many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and successfully combines humor, social commentary, mysticism, and a deep sympathy with its characters.
Tags: BookClub 
Define external redirect: Musik der Welt LaunchPad Parlando
Maurice Brown Are you the same Alex Schroeder whose father is “Helmut”, now in Brazil?
– Maurice Brown 2012-06-06 08:52 UTC
AlexSchroeder Yes indeed! Hi Maurice.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-06-06 21:08 UTC
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