Changes to Fiction Canon

[Kirby1024]

A decision by the Directors has been passed regarding the Fiction boards.

These are the changes, in short:

1) Fictions posted on any of the Fiction Boards are to be considered (by default) to have Non Canon status within the Opnet Board.

2) Fictions may be regarded as Opnet Board Canon status as long as a majority of the players on the opnet regard the story as such. In short, the majority of total players on the Opnet Board must want the story told to have some impact in order for it to be considered part of the Opnet World.

3) The Fiction board is no longer to be within the "jurisdiction" of the Opnet Directors, due to the new ruling. Instead, the current Fiction Moderators (namely, me) and the current Administrators shall have total jurisdiction over all fiction contained within the board. Any complaints about any fictions within any of the Fiction Boards should go directly to me, preferably by PM.

That is all, I'm happy to answer questions about the new change.

[Sam Grey]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kirby1024:
2) Fictions may be regarded as Opnet Board Canon status as long as a majority of the players on the opnet regard the story as such. In short, the majority of total players on the Opnet Board must want the story told to have some impact in order for it to be considered part of the Opnet World.

So... how do we deal with this change? Do we have to start a new fiction discussion thread to hold a vote every single time we want to have a fiction considered canon within the board?

[Iron Rose]

I was kinda wondering that myself

[Ptesan-Wi]

So, if I understand this correctly, the various fictions that have breathed life and background into our various characters are no longer considered to have happened for the purposes of the OpNet unless a vote is taken on each and every one and a majority of the total players on the OpNet board -- a majority that is nigh-impossible to reach, given the scarcity of many of the players -- gives it a thumbs-up?

Color me concerned. Actually, color me pissed-off.

-- Timeslip/Sandcaster/Thoughtwave

[Good Alice]

Why not have it the other way around. That the default being canon for the board and then having peopl voting it out of canon?

[z-Carver]

I have two concerns. The first lies with the fact that I cannot get the range of role-play on the in-character forums that I can in the fictions. The vast majority of my characters' developments have taken place on the fiction boards, mostly because the in-character discussion thread is very limited. There are some stories, such as Returning to the Past, that would not be brought up to the IC forum because of the secrecy involved, so they would essentially never happen. And frankly, if that's the case, then why am I pouring my heart and soul into writing, only to have it mean, essentially, nothing?

Personal grudges also concern me. Right now, I have a player that I know would veto my stories just because they could. And right now it's one, but what if I do a fiction with someone who is unpopular? The fiction could be very, very good, but would get vetoed because of personal issues. I would rather see the Directors vote on the canon-worthiness of a fiction than my fellow posters, on the theory that they would be more impartial.

I hate to sound like a child, but the fictions are what drew me here in the first place. It was the chance to really tell my stories and have them live and breathe in the hearts and minds of myself and those who read and participate in them. If they are made useless, then I don't think that I'll be coming back here often. The fictions were my pride and joy, and part of that pride came from the joy of knowing that they were building a world.

Establish this rule if you must, but you are going to lose people over it, I think. And I think that I'll be the first you lose. That makes me terribly, terribly sad - I have enjoyed N!Prime very much but if this new rule is enforced, then I won't enjoy N!Prime as much, and I think that I'd rather leave it for good than endure it in a lesser form.

Sorry to be "I'm taken my toys and leaving!" but that's the way I feel.

[Augment]

In my opinion, it's going to be kind of hard to get a majority of players since there are so many here that don't regularly post.

I think a better method would be to have them considered Canon until some sort of concern was brought up about a particular thread, then it can be taken from there. The way things are now, all these fictions that have happened in the past are no longer canon, just because we don't have a majority or our players here anymore.

- Amped/Augment/Bandwidth

[Iron Rose]

What's the point of it then if it cannot be considered Cannon? I've worked hard and continue to work hard on what I put out there. If it's "Oh this doesn't happen unless everyone says it does" now, I hardly see the point of continuing.

-Long/Iron Rose/Shen-Kahn/Tetsuhara

[Jager]

First off, if this was my fault, I apologize for being the person who caused this ruling. I wrote about something I felt I needed to write about, wanted to write about, and came to realize was something very, very unpopular with the membership here.

Beyond that Kirby, this is crap. The Directors have decided that ALL of the fictions are, by default, nonsense and useless to canon continuity unless there is a hue and cry to make it canon.

The majority of total players on the Opnet Board?

Exactly how many people is that?

How many votes do we need to round up to make it canon?

Sigh ...

What a shame.

Kirby, so now all fiction complaints are leveled at you and not at the individual authors ...

Don't like that much either, I'm afraid.

[Jager]

As far as I am concerned, if someone posts something in the fictions, I will consider it canon amongst my characters. I respect my fellow posters. If I have a serious problem with what they do, I will take it up with them like an adult. If that makes my characters appear selectively delusional to certain others, so be it.

Have a nice day.

[Ptesan-Wi]

Likewise. Timeslip, Sandcaster and Thoughtwave will consider all posts in the Fiction section as canon in any instance where they are made aware IC of the events.

[Augment]

All I can say is, that I think the default needs to be canon until decided otherwise, not the otherway around.

[z-Carver]

Ah, the smell of mutiny in the morning. However, in all seriousness, I think that the Directors now understand that the fictions are taken very, very seriously by the players. They are the best tool by which we build "our" shared world. It is one thing to say that you have a fun day out with so-and-so in character, and a very different thing to actually touch on those things and build them in the fictions thread.

Carver/Sean/whoever-else-I-have-brewing-my-head will respect other's fictions as canon as well.

That said, and confident now that it will mean something, I have a party to start.

[Sakurako Hino]

Quote:

Originally posted by Thoughtwave:
So, if I understand this correctly, the various fictions that have breathed life and background into our various characters are no longer considered to have happened for the purposes of the OpNet unless a vote is taken on each and every one and a majority of the total players on the OpNet board -- a majority that is nigh-impossible to reach, given the scarcity of many of the players -- gives it a thumbs-up?

Color me concerned. Actually, color me pissed-off.

-- Timeslip/Sandcaster/Thoughtwave

I haven't seen this concern answered yet, so put me in the same boat.

I've been here since about 2001, and now to see the backlog of originally IC posts changed on a single whim to NC with a single wave of the hand, while the stories made in some form or another had some sort of tie to the OpNet board, well to put it mildly, I'm pissed.

If people are so concerned about the current nature of the OpNet, why don't we just hit reset with this ruling and start over from scratch? Because that is pretty much how this is gonna work, and what this ruling implies.

Quite frankly it sucks, and if it's fully policy I'm going to rethink how much involvement I have here, since I don't have the time to play politics and get enough people properly backscratched to get a story approved as IC.

[Kirby1024]

OK, I'll try to elaborate - apparently the short version doesn't get the gist of the new change.

The change probably won't adversely affect everyone's fiction experience. To add a level of interpretation to the whole thing, What has happenned is that the Directors have no desire to continue monitoring the fiction forums, and as a result, have decided to "cut loose" the fiction section. It was never supposed to be in their job description anyway to monitor the fiction section, and in fact the fiction section was /never/ intended to be as large a part of the opnet board as it is currently.

Now, people are still free to use the fiction section for roleplaying, (in fact we encourage you too!) but the directors are no longer responsible for the canon effects of any fiction/roleplay log published within the opnet forum.

So, what does this mean for you, the player? Actually, not too much. The whole voting angle is probably a poor choice of words, and the better description of the intent of that rule is "If people accept your story, then your story can be counted as canon". No formal vote required, but if a large percentage of the forums go "No way, that's just stupid", then yeah, it's stupid and the fiction doesn't count towards canon. The change is that the directors are no longer responsible for making sure that all the fiction meets with the stringent Opnet Board FAQ guidelines, because hey, according to the Directors, they're no longer automatically a part of the world. It's up to you, the players, to decide which fictions you can tolerate being in the game world, and which ones are just too... wrong.

This should have a salutary effect on you people, BTW - you can write whatever the damn hell you want to write in the Fiction boards, and you don't have to worry about the directors throwing it all back into your face. Instead, you simply have to convince other players that your story is worth their time. As a note, the Directors still have jurisdiction over the actual Opnet Board, so referencing obviously FAQ-breaking stuff on that board is still a big no-no. But other than that, feel free to post, well, whatever you like. No longer will you have to worry about Directors forcing NC tags on you, or telling you to drop the fiction because it doesn't comply with Opnet FAQ.

Have fun people. Enjoy your new freedom. The only limits to your canon fun is now what everyone around you will accept in their canon world. It's that simple. Does that more adequately explain the new changes?

[Ptesan-Wi]

OK, that puts a whole new wheel on the wagon. Thanks for the clarification, Kirby.

[Ptesan-Wi]

This is my dirt-simple, I Am Not A Lawyer And Don't Want To Be One interpretation:

The fictions are as good as canon, even if not automatically granted an official declaration as such, and we can reference them as such in the OpNet without worrying about the Directors coming down on us for doing so.

The only difference is, if half the board stands up and yells "NO WAY" about a fiction, it shouldn't be referenced as canon. And given the size of the player base, that isn't going to happen except in extreme cases.

[kestrel404]

Thanks, that is a much better explanation. You might want to even put this at the top of the thread so that newcomers won't immediately post and then find out later that it's a covered topic.

Anyway, that's fine by me, but it actuall poses a bit of a logistical problem: Keeping track of the weird threads. With new freedom will likely come expanded storylines. I know I've posted stories in the past that bend the limits of the FAQs, but I still considder them cannon. On the other hand, some stories are just so mundane or so completely plausible (anything with a couple of novas talking and not doing much, most of the giant group party threads, generally the not-earth-shattering stuff) that it would be silly NOT to considder them canon.

As an idea, I think we should add a couple of tags to the [NC] and [AU] that are already in the FAQ.

[P] - Personal, would be stuff that only really applies to your character

[PI] - Personal interaction, would be stuff that only applies to a small group of characters.

These are pretty simple and straightforwards. Your story shouldn't involve any cannon characters, and you shouldn't blow stuff up or kill people. This kind of story I don't think anyone can object to.

[CA] - Canon/Continuum Altering, where you do something that changes the world or the canon characters.

This tag applies to several of the old fictions, as well as the new ones. If you involve canon characters, if you wreak havoc on a larger-than-building scale, if you cause trouble for novas in a significant geographic area, etc., this would apply.

[ACA] - Accepted Canon Altering, would be the newly needed tag, since by default your cannon altering stories wouldn't necessarily be accepted. This would be a tag that you'd use to point newbies to stories that alter the landscape. I'll leave it up to other as to how a story gets from CA to ACA.

Anyone think this is a worthwhile idea?

[RPG Post]

I figured I'd give a little input on our end here.

Under the previous system, it required us to monitor each and every single post on the fiction boards and then react if a single one of them violated the FAQ. That's a helluva lot of posts and an incredible amount of reading that is required by all involved, plus any additional debate on whether or not any action was actually required on our part. And in most cases, it really wasn't something that needed our attention to begin with. There was also the concern that there seemed to be expection on the part of the population that we were supposed to prevent this from happening - and to be blunt - a single line that violates the FAQ buried under the weight of 100 or so pages of MS Word document is likely to escape our attention, considering just how busy the fiction forums have been.

A lot of you spot things before we do and start the rumbling process long before it ever makes its way to us. The immune system of the site used to be completely in the player's hands and for this part of the site, it's back in your hands.

What does this mean for the future?

Honestly, not much.

The only difference between then and now is that the forums decide whether or not something is "accepted." Which, in truth, is the way it's normally been but it's never been stated outright.

"Default non-canon" only means that if you, the forums, don't like then it isn't considered part of the world. We knew and expected that pretty much everything would be considered okay by the people here.

Thoughtwave's post is pretty much right on the money. If you don't like something, let it be known and talk about it and we'll all let our opinons make the decision. There's not going to be any official voting or any official tags unless that's what everyone wants.

Or, in other words - the fiction boards are YOURS. What you decide in terms of policing them is up to you.

We know that the fiction boards are important to everyone, and that in the past few months they've eclipsed the OpNet boards several times over in terms of activity.

We're just not there to tell you no any longer.

Oh yeah, and canon only has 2 n's, not 3. Cannon is that big thing what shoots heavy balls at opposing forces.

[Kirby1024]

Oh, and to clear up a possible misunderstanding before it comes into play, No, I've not become the Arbiter of Canon for the Fiction board (something that others have thought) - the players now have this role. My job as Fiction Moderator is to ensure that, in short, things stay clean, well-run and that any meta-complaints about any fiction (like inappropriateness, labelling requirements, etc) are dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

Players are welcome to come to me to resolve disputes about fiction, but I'll typically be responsible for the more OOC end of things, rather than the IC specifics of what happens within a fiction.

[Sherazahde]

I'm okay with this, mostly. My biggest concern is that we'll just suffer through something that should be dealt with rather than make a big deal about it. But since anything that would need us to make an uproar will probably be big enough to do so, I'm not too worried.