The Quest for the Legends

Who was the ten-year-old that stole your fic and mauled it?^1 (Yeah, I read the endless ATCH thing. I was bored.)

Somebody named Kristin. All I know about her. It was at some website with a lot of younger children in it writing Pokémon stories and "Our Great Pokémon Journey" had gathered quite a following before she randomly declared that she'd "lost her notes" for it and wouldn't be continuing once she'd posted the equivalent of chapter 25. Well, except she stole the UMR, so it was chapter 27 then.

P.S (To Butterfree): @_@ What was the command to link things to different sections of this board with text? (I mean the process to make THIS a link.)

Text here[/url*]. Remove the star.

P.P.S (Again, to Butterfree): ^_^ How's your summer going?

Reasonably fine so far.

To add a point to this post: Draognfree, what do you think of the overall quality of Pokemon fanfiction recently? This also refers to the ones on FFN. (Would be nice to hear an opinion on that from a literate author…)

I don't really go on FanFiction.Net except to post my own stuff, and in fact I don't read a lot of fanfiction in general. :/ I'm following maybe two or three fics and reading the occasional one-shot; I'm not the person to give any sort of general evaluation on Pokémon fanfiction today.

What's your advice for anyone who attempts to write an OT fic? Any warnings, do's and don't's, etc.?

My main piece of advice for OT fics is to have a region map of some sort, whether it's a canon region or a made-up one (especially the latter, of course). A detailed one. And then write a description of all the locations like what the landscape is like (for routes), how many people live there (for cities), why it's named whatever it's called, possibly native Pokémon, et cetera. It's incredible how much you can spin out of a spur-of-the-moment location description written long before the characters actually get there, and it adds depth to the setting.

Have you considered setting up a forum-based roleplay using settings like Ruxido where the characters are the Leta(l/ligon) in the herd? (I think there was a thread before the forums were wiped about how to get activity up, and while thinking about that this came to mind.)

Uh, seeing as I don't roleplay myself, I don't really think I'm the right person to set up any kind of roleplay… If somebody else were interested in doing this sort of thing, I wouldn't have anything against making a forum for it.

What's your dream job? (Figured you're too old for me to ask what you want to be when you grow up, xD)

A professional writer. Possibly a teacher, programmer and/or web designer on the side.

Am I asking too many (personal) questions?

No. I'm rather bored, really, and questions are fun.

Okay, so as I said in the Quest Blog recently, the lack of forum activity makes me saaaad. You know best what would make you more active here, so, well, what do you think could be done about it?

My observations on the subject:
- I believe the forum largely died with the "Your Own Fanfiction" forum, or at least I got the impression that that forum was fairly active before the forum crash. So where are all the fics?
- At some point somebody suggested some sort of a forum RPG - how many of you would be interested in that sort of thing?
- Would you be more active if there were a forum for general discussion unrelated to fanfiction?


Any thoughts?

I have no idea about cheating devices; I have never so much as been in the same room as one.

And please don't post twice in a row if you forgot to mention something; use the Edit link in the top right corner of your post.

Dragonfree, if someone ran away to your house (your adress isn't that hard to find, but, then again, no one can obbsess like I can,) told your parents you were helping them with alderbra, then went up to you and told you they ran away here and that they were never going back, then somehow you guys get in some weird medevil movie about assaisnating the king, what would you do?

Assume it was a really fun dream and then have fun. :P I can't respond realistically to a scenario that involves getting into a medieval movie about assassinating a king.

1.) Butterfree is now somewhere in Switzerland on a short vacation. She won't be back until next Tuesday, so she will probably respond to these posts then (unless she happens to get some free time and a computer to make a quick comment here and there).

:o

3.) Isn't the time on these boards already GMT (in other words, Icelandic time)? Isn't it a little redundant to show somebody that lives in Iceland on a board that has the same time as Iceland that you have the time it is currently in Iceland? Just saying. >_> (What is your second watch for anyway?)

The time on these boards is actually the time on the server, which is in London.

I feel like pointing out that Iceland isn't GMT; it's GMT-1.

No, it's not! >:/ We're the ones who are GMT all year round, because unlike you silly Brits (and half of the rest of the world but whatever), we don't confuse ourselves by randomly changing the clock in the summer!

I coded them myself. Hence, you know, the lack of features.

(Invisionfree is a free forum host; I could not possibly be using Invisionfree, since the forum is integrated into the minipage and is obviously not remotely hosted.)

There was no agreement. I just had a thread where you could suggest new features, which might be added if people want them, they sound good, and I can think of a way to make them without the biggest headache in the world.

…that would be because you can't just paste an image into a text field and people on the Internet can then magically see it. Go upload the image at an image host, such as Tinypic, and then use the URL it gives you.

Do I ever remind you of anyone you know?

No.

Is there a way to find the secret ID on the game?

Not really; the only way I can imagine it being possible is if you have a shiny and somehow find out its personality value and thus figure out your secret ID from that somehow.

Oh, and where would I learn how to make a forumy code such as this?

"A forumy code"? You mean to code your own forum? Uh, you could just check out tutorials for a scripting language of your choice and MySQL.

And did you know that it is easy to get to the in-progress movie reviews with simple URL manipulation?

OMG NO HOW CAN THAT BE??? :oooo

Yes, that's rather obvious. Not that it will actually help you most of the time, since the files on the server won't actually be updated unless I happen to be updating the site for other reasons. It's not like the movie reviews are a secret. o_O

Huh, I did put a "change username" functionality into the forum. What do you know. (Wait, can't you access that yourself, though? Edit Options?)

Would you ever consider doing a backstory fic like 'Scyther's Story' for Gyarados and/or Spirit?

Funny you should ask. I actually started writing something like that for Spirit the other day (primarily explaining why she developed her Ghost-type powers). It would never be anywhere near as long as Scyther's Story, though; it would just be a one-shot.

Gyarados, eh, I kind of doubt it, since there isn't that much to his backstory that you don't already know, really. :/

Butterfree, when you started writing the fic did you know exactly what was going to happen or did you make it up as you went along?

It was all made up as I went along, or rather slightly ahead of it. Which is a good thing, because whatever this fic would be if I'd planned it out in its entirety when I was twelve, it certainly wouldn't be any good.

And what spoilers? There aren't any spoiler tags on this forum, if that's what you were wondering about; it's pretty much assumed that the entire forum is stuffed with spoilers and you shouldn't be here if you haven't read the ILCOE.

That's in the CSS, right?

Yes.

Is it possible to change the name of the fic in the other forum? If there is, how do we do it?

Unfortunately, no, I haven't implemented a feature like that. If it's desperately needed, I can see what I can do.

No; it's the exact same spam verification script used in my guestbook, so it's completely random (and has a 1/8192 chance of being shiny). You were just insanely lucky.

The chapter is nearly done, I swear. It's just hard to get it to end and I need to be getting to bed since my first day of work is tomorrow.

On the other hand, to practice my AJAX and jQuery skills for said job, I went and randomly made inline editing of posts possible here on the forums. If you click the Edit link on one of your own posts and have Javascript enabled, the post will turn into a textarea and you can edit it right there instead of having to load a new page. Of course, if you don't have Javascript enabled, it'll just take you to the old edit post page and that should work exactly like it used to.

(The coding of this forum is really messy. I kind of want to redo it, or at least reorganize it. But I have better things to do first.)

I also rewrote the About section because I needed to update the age of the fic anyway and then I just felt like it.

EDIT: This is an edit done with the new inline editing thing. Whoo.

Oh, yeah, and feedback on that would be very much appreciated, especially if it's buggy or something.

ANOTHER EDIT: Fixed the BBCode parsing on the blog, which caused line breaks not to be parsed correctly in a post that had been edited inline.

Can guests edit comments?

No. The forum can't know if you're the same guest who posted the original post or not. That's the point of registration.

On the other hand, I fail to see how AJAX connects to Internet coding. Are you talking about something I don't know about, or are you talking about the stuff I use to clean the toilet?

:P It's short for Asynchronous Javascript And XML and is basically a way for client-side Javascript to communicate with the server behind the scenes without the user needing to reload the page. Any web page that allows you to save data or to display new server-side data that didn't exist when you loaded the page without the whole page being refreshed is using AJAX to do it.

Inline editing is so fun that I'm doing it randomly just for the hell of it.

I've had this idea for a little while about implementing some sort of a tag system here. Now, since I was writing that one-shot with Spirit's backstory, which also touches on May's, and started worrying about whether it was all consistent with everything I've said in Ask the Characters and so on, I went and made it.

Currently, only I can tag posts. This is because the primary intended purpose of this feature is to facilitate a better organization of all the relevant information I've posted on the forum - I want users (and myself) to be able to search for posts tagged with a particular character, for instance, in order to see all questions they've answered in Ask the Characters, any tidbits I've posted about them in threads, etc. If people really want tagging ability, that could be arranged somehow, but right now I don't think the forum is big enough to really warrant it; there isn't much in the way of stuff I'd imagine people would really need to be able to find quickly except for those fic-relevant tidbits.

In any case, I'm still in the process of going through and tagging stuff, so be patient while that happens. If you have any suggestions for tags that already-tagged posts ought to have, tags that should be added in general or not-me posts that warrant tagging, please let me know.

That Spirit one-shot is pretty much finished, but as I said I want to finish the tagging in order to be sure I'm not contradicting myself anywhere; once that's done, though, it should be up pretty soon.

There has also been progress with chapter 55, so yay?

I'm not really planning to write more backstory one-shots for the moment - the point of writing one for Spirit is that she actually had relevant stuff happening in her past that I don't really foresee coming up in the story because it's not that important. The other Pokémon with relevant backstories all pretty much had them explained in chapter 27. If I feel the urge I might do one for Letaligon or something, but don't count on it.

User tagging would work basically the way you suggested, Rose - there would be Butterfree-tags and user tags, but kept separate both in the post display and the tag searching (so that you could search only for posts I tagged with whatever).

So here it is, that Spirit spin-off one-shot. Nothing spectacular; it's just a brief account of baby Spirit's testing, plus a little bit of seven-year-old May and her father.

I've also finished tagging all my relevant posts in the Quest for the Legends forum as well as some of the Quest Blog forum. I'm thinking about organizing the tags somehow, maybe splitting them into character tags, other fic-related tags and unrelated tags or something like that, to make the searching easier to do.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but I randomly decided that in addition to how far into the next chapter I am, I'm going to have a quote from what I've written so far in my signature. With this, I also decided that it's about time I allowed blog browsers to see that stuff without finding my posts at the forums, so my signature is now displayed on Quest Blog posts.

EDIT: On second thought, I put the signature on the main blog page at the top instead. Seemed kind of redundant to have the same signature showing below every post on the page.

I've gone and categorized all the tags into Characters, Other fic-related and Off-topic. Hopefully this will make things somewhat easier to find, though it's giving me an unnerving sense of just how ridiculously many characters there are in this fic.

There has been some progress with the chapter, but right now I'm in a really productive websitey mood, so I think it will have to wait a bit more.

Hm, does that happen for you too? It happens for me because the way it calculates what's the "last page" is done from the "Replies" count which is stored individually for the thread; that should be lowered when people delete posts, while I can see deleted posts so the actual total of replies (and thus pages, if there are enough deleted posts) is higher than it assumes when it calculates the last page. I would have thought that only happened for me, though, since you can't see deleted posts. I'll look into it.