Administrator

Friendly...or else!

Submitted by on

An incident happened this morning. Those involved know what happened. I got angry and shut the site down to cool off so that I did not say things I would regret or ban anyone.

The rule here is friendly. If the comment, blog or forum post you want to make is not friendly ... don't make it. Next time, I think I will have to ban a few people. I don't want to do that so please don't test me on it.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

BigCloset Volume 1 Draft Story List

This is the first draft story list for Volume One. Stories on this list may be excluded, or more stories may be added to the final book/list depending on Author Availability/Cooperation and other variables. If one of your stories is on this list, please fill out the permission contract form or send me a PM. -- Erin

Author: 

Audience Rating: 

Other Keywords: 

Minor computer problems

Submitted by on

Haven't been on most of the day due to minor computer problems. My Time Machine backup disk turned flakey on me so I had to go to town, buy a new one and, bring it home and reformat it for MacOS and install. Not really a big deal, but I got a decent drive instead of a cheapie and that took some research.

Hugs,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Spare a Thought

Submitted by on

The devastation in northern Alabama seems to have affected our member Stanman who has not been onsite since early Thursday morning. Let us hope that it is just disruption of internet or electricity and that Stan is okay. There may be other BC members who are having connectivity problems in this extreme weather, remember them also.

Hugs to all,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Unfriendliness

Submitted by on

A certain amount of unfriendliness will be tolerated here. I just remove unfriendly posts and issue occasional warnings and explanations. But willfully pursuing another poster here with an obvious intent to cause harm will not be tolerated. Two people tonight went over the line and their accounts have been suspended. These same two have done this before and undoubtedly, if I were to reinstate their accounts, would do so again.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Snow

Submitted by on

A peculiar noise woke me this morning -- the sound of snow sliding off the carport roof. We had about two inches of snow last night. It's bright and sunny now and well above freezing so the fluffy white stuff is not going to last till noon but I'm sure the people in the ski resorts on the mountains would rather have it up there than down here. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Publisher Oops

Submitted by on

There's a situation that has developed with a publisher of TG fiction. This person is a member of the community and at last report is attempting to straighten things out and make things right with the affected authors. I don't think much else needs to be said here at the moment.

Hugs,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Meta-criticism

Submitted by on

I unpubbed some recent comments. I really dislike doing this and I dislike trying to explain it. I read the comments carefully and decided that they came across as clueless.

It's like complaining about a Laurel and Hardy film, "Why would anybody hire those two to do anything?" Because if no one did, there would be no movie.

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

BigCloset Drupal 6 Upgrade

Submitted by on

Well, it's becoming more and more obvious that we need to upgrade to Drupal 6. We've got several Drupal 6 sites now running, Stardust is on 6. So, it's time to upgrade TopShelf.

We're going to do a dummy version first, probably this week and then later, in a week or a month when we're convinced it's going to work, take BCTS down while we do the conversion on live data.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Are there standards for commenting on BigCloset?

Submitted by on

More or less. Reparable things like typos, punctuation errors, typography, or presentation errors (spacing, non-appearance of images, etc.) should not be mentioned in public comments because that would necessitate an admin removing the comment after the fault is fixed. You wouldn't paint a sign on the forehead of someone's baby saying, "Stinky diaper!" when a whispered word to a caregiver would be much more appreciated.

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

BC-V1 Chat Meeting - Part 4 - Wednesday Mar 2 at 6 pm PST

Submitted by on

See you there, we're going to talk about how to narrow the field of selections for the book, even though we are still accepting nominations. Also discussed will be naming some "captains" for the editing, that is people besides me to take problems to. :) Probably other subjects will come up.

Hugs,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

BC-V1 Chat Meeting - Part 3

Submitted by on

Today we talked about editing standards and decided on Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice as our editing platform.

The workflow will be nomination, choices and priorities, permission, conference with author, editing revisions, approval from author, final edit, proofing, layout, final approvals.

Stories that get hung up in the process will probably be allowed to slip to the next volume. We now have about 150 stories nominated, though some of them are too long. At any rate, we have no dearth of stories to go into Volume 1. :)

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

BC-V1 Chat Meeting - Part 2

Submitted by on

We had a productive but fairly technical chat meeting last night and hammered out some details of how the book will look and calculated again to be sure we can get 150,000 words into 320 pages of an 8x10 trade paperback with nice margins and typography. It is not only doable, I think it will be quite a handsome book!

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Big Closet-Volume 1 - Chat Meetings

Submitted by on

Here's the idea, a trade paperback of around 300-320 pages featuring some of the best stuff that has appeared on BigCloset over the last eleven years and perhaps some new stuff, too. The book would be 6x9 inches, more or less, and retail for $15. That's around 100,000 words, btw. The book would be available to be ordered here on BC, through Amazon and possibly through other channels. There might be an electronic edition which would probably be sold for $10. And we might put the electronic edition into the Hatbox for contributors.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Why use CAPTCHA on the site?

Submitted by on

Due to the enormous increase in SPAM bots visiting the site, I've been forced to add CAPTCHAs to the sign-up page. On some days recently, we've had as many as 150 bogus signups. The bots can't get in because they never reply to the emails sent out but they bog down the system with useless database entries and queries.

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Happy Birthday, Cuddles the Puppadog

Submitted by on

It's my dog Cuddles birthday today, she's seven and is getting a small bite of blueberry waffle to celebrate!

Oh, yeah, it's Groundhog Day, too, and bright and sunny here so that probably means six more weeks of winter for us, but luckily it's cloudy or even worse in most of the country. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

How PRIVATE is the Private Messaging system here on BigCloset?

Submitted by on

Pretty private but it isn't encrypted and as Admin of the system, I can look at any message from either end. That is, I can look at all sent messages from any account and at all received messages any account. I can even look at most messages that have been deleted from both ends. This is actually similar to how all Private Messaging, and for that matter eMail, works. I don't look unless there is a damn good reason to do so such as an apparent flaw in the system or an allegation of abuse.

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

What's the policy on privacy of PMs and Email?

Submitted by on

Privacy is important here at BigCloset and how that relates to Private Messages and Email is pretty simple.

Don't quote extensively in any public forum, here or elsewhere, from any PM or Email received from someone you know to be a BigCloset member without prior permission of the original sender.

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

It's sad when a toy dies

Submitted by on

A few minutes ago, Cuddles killed her toy Skunkie that I got her for Christmas. Skunkie had been on life support since Cuddles bit the squeaker out of the tail on Sunday. Now, both of the squeakers are broken and pulled out of the plush. It's the nature of dogs to kill the toys they love the best fastest. She's never killed a toy quite so quickly before, just 6 days; it usually takes more like four to six months. But she had never loved a toy quite as much as she loved Skunkie.

Skunkie is dead. Long live Wheelie, the toy that squeaks AND rolls like a wheel!

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Merry Christmas to All!

Submitted by on

We've got rain here. After two days of sunshine it's back to rain again. It's getting downright soggy. I don't live in any of the mudslide-threatened areas but there have been evacuations and road closings. Even one of the freeways was closed because of boulders loosened by the rain rolling down the mountainsides and into traffic.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Capitalization and Titles

Submitted by on

Properly capitalization in the title box really isn't that hard. In most browsers, if you just start typing the new title, it will fill in the most recent one, then you backspace over the number and retype that and the title is correct. But there have been a lot of misspelled, misspaced and miscapitalized titles lately. They look bad on the story and they look bad on the site. Sometimes titles are in ALL CAPS and if they are more than one short word long, I feel that should be fixed, too.

How should I deal with this:

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Why does my story appear blank even though there are thousands of words?

Submitted by on

You need blank lines between paragraphs, not just cause it looks better but because of how the internal Drupal parser works. Without line breaks, the parser tries to process the entire post as one single paragraph, runs out of memory and fails. It should give an error message but mostly, it doesn't.

So, please, blank lines between paragraphs for anything longer than about 2000 words.

Hugs,
Erin

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Another below average day, Wednesday's are such a drag -- so to speak :)

Submitted by on

We've only had SEVENTEEN stories posted today. What's the matter with you people? :)

For the past month, from November 16 to December 15, we've AVERAGED over 19.5 stories a day.

For the past week, we've averaged almost 17000 visitors a day! For the busiest five hours of the day, we're averaging about 1000 visitors an hour. Sometimes, there are as many as 390 people all visiting a page within the same five minute window!

No wonder the searches were bringing us down!

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Dog food

Submitted by on

My dog has food allergies. Poor Cuddles when she gets exposed to corn, soy or wheat breaks out in a rash and runs a fever. I had a solution to this problem in that for six months I fed her nothing but homemade dogfood, guaranteed not to contain any of her allergens.

At the end of that time, I started adding back in small amounts of commercial dogfood touted as not containing any of those ingredients. Slowly her allergies returned. Yesterday, I made the decision to go back to homemade dogfood, at least for another four or six months to clean her system.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

October 2010 All Hallows Eve Story Contest

Halloween1.jpg
TopShelf's
October 2010
All Hallows Eve
Story Contest
 haunted-house.jpg
Entry Submission Dates are from October 1, 2010 until October 30, 2010.
The Big Spooky Revelation Night to find the lucky ghouls & guys who won is, of course, on Sunday October 31, 2010!
CONTEST CLOSED! Please click on this link and read our entries and Kudo the ones u like best Contest Entries
New! Due to a larger amount of late entries,

I am going to extend voting with Kudos for one extra week after the deadline to give them a chance to gather votes.
Voting deadline ends midnight November 6, 2010 Pacific time. Results posted November 7, 2010.
The Entry deadline is still October 30, 2010 at midnight Pacific time.

 
 

Author: 

Audience Rating: 

Contests: 

Other Keywords: 

Site down for about twenty minutes

Submitted by on

Something took the site down at about 230 PM PDT. It was slow or down for a few minutes then I reset the server and things see okay now. We had a usage peak right then, we usually do about that time but normally it doesn't cause the server to lag so bad.

Maybe a robot or someone tried to harvest the site. The logs don't show that, though, so I don't know what it was. All seems well, now. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Forums: 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

HatBox Gateway Page

This is a gateway page for the HatBox, BigCloset's premium pages where stories given by authors can be viewed or downloaded by people who have contributed money to the maintenance of BigCloset. After one year in the Hatbox, contributed stories are made available elsewhere, either on BC or on the donors' own websites. Downloads are made available on the honor system, please do not distribute these files privately as that would be a violation of the copyright of the author.

If you want to go directly to the HatBox the link is: The HatBox. You will need your Hatbox user id and password (different from your BigCloset id and password) to access the HatBox stories.

If you want to join the HatBox, the link is: HatBox Membership. This is the same as the link with the kitty in the right column.

After the |Read More| is a list of the stories currently in the HatBox with links to the pages there offering the stories in various download formats.

Author: 

Audience Rating: 

Publication: 

Genre: 

Fanfiction and Copyrights

Submitted by on

When writing fanfiction, like the current Comics Retcon Universe stuff, it's polite and considerate to acknowledge the current copyright and/or trademark holders, when known. Especially if using artwork or logos.

Just a line near the top or bottom of a story, or on the Title page is enough. And it isn't required here, it's just a nice thing to do for the original owners of the stuff.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

PayPal Problem

Submitted by on

Someone raided my PayPal account for $400. Paypal was suspicious so they flagged the transaction but NOT before charging my credit card. I contacted the seller and they have agreed to refund the charges so it will get resolved. Meanwhile I have to wonder who the heck got into my PayPal account and charged $400 against a social networking sites internal accounts.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Author: 

Pages

Subscribe to Administrator