h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I hope everyone who feels similarly is willing to dig in and continue expressing their negative feelings towards the BBC's unreasonable restrictions."

Fair enough, but wouldn't you be happier if those who felt the same were positive and constructive on site, and trying to avoid the stale edges of the bread? People complaining all the time is going to turn h2g2 into a depressing place - hey, you already mentioned it! So why not get your teeth into encouraging the positive aspects of h2g2, rather than spreading unhappy tidings about moderation?

It's up to you, of course, but on one hand you're bemoaning that h2g2 is getting depressing, and on the other hand you post quite a bit about how depressing it's getting. Is there danger of upi helping to create a destructive vicious circle?

[Shiny, Happy Subcomandante shockingly saying something positive about h2g2...]

Last night while trying to think of bad BBC tv shows to mention in that last post to you (Mark), I went to bbc.co.uk looking for other examples besides AYBS. (Please note that the acronym for Are You Being Served is frighteningly close to AYBABTU. All Your Being Served Are Belong To US?) Poked around for maybe fifteen minutes, until finally I found something new called Yoho Ahoy.

Since I have a fanatical fondness for all things piratical, particularly TOYS, I scrambled for a half hour searching for websites with any further mention of the show. Found a few articles about the animators, but very little on bbc.co.uk.

Then I posted a note about it in my h2g2 journal, asking anyone who knows about the show to email me related URLs at deidzoeb@viva-la revolution.co.uk. What a joy it is to have a friendly community like this where people can discuss and share their interests, and trade URLS with only a few work arounds that they wouldn't have to mess with on other online communities (oops.)

Sorry if protests get you down. Unreasonable moderation is depressing to us too. I'm not sure how we accomplish protest in a "positive" way, although it seems that these words "positive" and "constructive" have been consistently used to describe people who are not protesting at all. From our perspective, protest *is* constructive, hoping to fix the community that has been partially damaged by BBC's destructive restrictions.

How can we make this a fun, delightful protest? Whenever we feel we've been wrongly silenced, we'll put a pair of bubble-gum wax lips in our mouths, instead of sewing them shut like :X. Maybe we should hold big bouquets of flowers in our mouths when we've been silenced? Start message threads about what desserts or delicacies we can shove in our mouths when the moderators prevent us from speaking (figuratively). I suppose catapulting stuffed animals at Bush House is out of the question, since that organizer in Quebec got sent to jail for it.

I'll try to keep the protests more wacky and peppy and joyful and positive in the future!

should read "[email protected]"

Mark, I wanted to write about African mammals, for one thing ... and what I was doing on the old h2g2 was to include pictures drawn by myself to illustrate each species. I wanted to do the same for plants as well. The pictures are the most important bit, because without them it's just a piece of text that looks just as boring as all the other pieces of text. I really wanted to make people excited and interested and enthusiastic about animals and plants and about wildlife conservation. With plants pictures are even more important because the plants I wanted to talk about are kinds completely unknown to the typical reading public of h2g2. Also it is rather impossible to describe the appearance of a plant accurately in text. Without pictures I can do absolutely nothing.

UM Pillowcase,

There are workarounds that would allow you to accomplish this somewhat. Like give links from your Guide Entries to a different site where you can store those pictures. Of course, it's not the kind of workarounds you would have to deal with at most other online communities, but it's still possible.

You could put up workarounds for now, and hope that in coming years h2g2 will evolve back to the height it had reached pre-BBC. I really think it will get back to where it was, if it survives at all.

By the way, how popular is the 'new' h2g2 compared to the old one - does anybody know?

I know I've stopped using it nearly so much as I did previously.

To be honest, I have jumped in more heavily after the BBSiege. The excitement of revolution compells me. But I've been socializing more, finding other interesting reading and discussions while waiting for returned salvos to be fired on the battle fronts.

Anyhow, if or when BBC decides to give it a full launch, I imagine they could create quite a stir and rally a big burst of new members. (How weird and ironic that the death of DNA caused an accidental surge of publicity for h2g2.)

But how do you define "popular"? People answering polls yes/no whether they like the site? Or would membership or activity be better measures of popularity?

Cool, Subcom! Perhaps I was just a bit depressed by postings like no 107 in http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F65237&thread=110236&skip=100&show=20 (not a very happy posting, really!). Still, that's politics.

Along with you, I'm also concerned that the Community might change into a more negative and bland place to hang out if things aren't done right, but I think continual complaining can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. This concern shouldn't stop the protesting and the criticism, but it'd be awful if h2g2 simply became a place where people complained about the BBC while forgetting about the great bits of h2g2. It's still a special place to hang out, as I hope you'd agree.

Pillowcase - yeah, you're right that we don't host pictures yet (we are planning to do so), but Subcom's quick fix is proving quite workable for a number of people, and we are looking to fix things. It changes things, definitely, but it's only a temporary setback - honest!

(Oh, and re traffic, we've got higher levels of traffic than we did before we joined the BBC, and that's with no real BBC publicity yet.)

Mark,

Re: posting 107 on that UK General Election thread. Looking back on it, it's really silly. People were drifting towards jokes instead of the defiant tone at the start of that thread (it was titled RIDICULOUS, after all). I knew after 10 pm, when the rules about UK General Election lifted, people would forget about it and think it was minor. Wanted to get more people riled about what seemed to me like censorship, before the whole thing evaporated.

I don't know what happened this weekend, but I feel like a kinder, gentler subcomandante lately. I unsubscribed from those flaming discussions on and about the infamous Intelligence thread. I've gone back and read some crap that others have replied to me there, and I'm just not going to respond, because it helps no one, and makes everyone in the flamewar look equally clownish. (Good luck with that lot.)

Then somebody wandered into the Zaphodista pages and dropped another post along the lines of what Smiley Ben and Jim DiGriz have said before, that Zaphodistas should just leave or "get over it." I ranted back at him a few days ago, but finally I just said, "I've heard all this before, frequently. I disagree." And now he and I can both go spend our time more wisely, instead of rehashing the same viewpoints every which way for the next several weeks.

Another person told me that some guide entries I wrote long ago were hurtful. ("Reasons to Avoid Texas.") I read through them again, and decided to delete those entries. They never brought anything but complaints, and they're just wrong tone for h2g2.

Not that I'm doing all this to clean up my image or anything. But it feels good to avoid the flaming tarpits, and if nothing else, it will save me a lot of wasted time. I could have finished my damn novel a dozen times over if I had been working on that instead of dueling on h2g2 for the past several weeks.

Oooh, you're writing a novel! Does it star talking insects that run revolutions?

Germ of the idea for this story: Young man feels he has no control over his life. If he were a pirate, no one would tell him what to do. He decides to become a pirate. ...By stealing a jet-ski.

The working title was "Absolutely No Dyeing In These Machines," but I decided not to use the laundromat subplot. So now it's maybe "Wet Thief" or "Ship in a Bottle" or something. ("Ship in a Bottle" would have a jet-ski in a bottle for front cover.) Definitely not "Peachfuzz the Pirate."

Hmm.. sounds interesting. When do we get to see a draft?

Can't say anything except 'bravo', Subcom. We all make postings that we later look at and wonder if we really meant to say *that* - and I'm no exception. But we all learn from it (well, most of us, anyway).

Good on ya, and I'm right with you on the avoiding flame wars thing. If I posted what I actually think most of the time, then the reputation of the h2g2 Team would be somewhat different. Tongue biting *can* be an artform!

Best of luck with the book. And thanks for the thoughtful comments.

When do you get to see a draft? When you pick it up in your local bookstore or library, I hope. I might post some chapters here, but you can't very well go to a publisher and ask them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on you "Oh, and by the way, since I posted it all on h2g2, BBC has full rights to print this too if they feel like it, in print or electronic or any format yet to be invented."

From the discussions I've seen among writers elsewhere on h2g2, it would probably be unwise to post anything on h2g2 if you wanted to try to sell it somewhere. Publishers or magazine editors want fresh stories, and they don't want to hear that it's been run all over a big web community. But a chapter or two out of a full novel shouldn't make it worthless.

I'm not sure it will be as valuable as all that, but hope I can fool some publisher into believing that it is.

Absolutely, Subcom - don't post anything here if you're planning to put it in a book! You could always put it on another site, point to it, and then invite comments on h2g2 though. Just a thought.

That's another thing that dissuades me from writing guide entries at the moment - copyright and publication issues! But I'll see if I can do something, perhaps just a single chapter or an article or two, just to give people a taste - working on two books at the moment, one fact and the other fiction!

To anyone who isn't familiar with writing & publishing & permissions: I didn't mean that to sound political, like I'm keeping my stories off h2g2 as a way to boycott h2g2, or as a form of protest. It just makes sense that stories or articles or books are less valuable to a publisher if they've been around where thousands of people could see them. Kind of an industry standard, from what I hear. (Not that I know much about the industry, apart from acquiring periodicals for the purpose of microfilming.)

Pillowcase, look at it this way. If you write some good Guide Entries that get accepted to the Edited Guide, you probably wouldn't be able to sell those pieces to a magazine. But a lot of publishers want to hear where you've been published before, and listing your contributions to the Edited Guide would be worthwhile.

Good point - and I for one didn't think you were being political, Subcom! I've been through the copyright argument so much in the last couple of years (and it hasn't changed since we launched) that it's like an old friend!