SquidgeWorld Archive

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly Contest post, here are the winners for June, 2023

On June 18th user nostalgia posted a work called Life At Extreme Temperatures

On June 25th user yinliaosha left a comment on Wenrenjiang_Fangirl's work Sincerely, yours always

Each user will be contacted asap about their win.

NOTE: If you would like to be excluded from the monthly contest and haven't already contacted me, please leave a comment on the main contest page (click this link to access). Thanks!

It was mostly unnoticeable to end users, but there was a process down that handles many behind-the-scenes work for the archive. The process was down from the afternoon of 6/29/23 until about 20 minutes ago (6/30/23 05:30 Pacific Time). While the archive can run without that process, it caused some issues with index counts being off, stories added to the archive not being indexed properly, and emails from being sent. The process is very reliable - but we were futzing with something behind the scenes and had to kill the process yesterday, and it didn't get restarted properly. It's up and running again, so we should be fine. But if you see any oddities or experience anything out of the ordinary, please let me know. Thanks!

Lots of tags have been added lately, and we taggers have been hunting down and doing what we can. You keep making more, and we'll wrangle them!

That said, I wanted to say a couple of things. First, we're not perfect. While I (Walter) know some fandoms very well, there are fandoms that I know nothing about, and have to rely on web searches and occasionally pull from what AO3 has for tags. Sometimes tags are there but people choose, for whatever reason, to add them a second time - and that's fine. Especially if you see a "FirstName LastName [Fandom]" tag as those tend to be going away. We've been marking the new tags as canonical (meaning: official) and then rolling the old tag into it.

If you are adding character tags and the character has only a first name, unless it's a unique name (e.g. Yoda or such) then please put the fandom as a suffix. There really shouldn't be any common-name tags (Stephanie, Brian, etc) without a fandom. Those are getting cleaned up as well.

And finally, a word about Original characters. You may notice that, unlike how AO3 has original characters, we've been making them canonical - meaning official, and then marking them as a child character of the Original Female Character, Original Male Character, or if it's unknown/ambiguous/etc just a child of Original Character. So when you decide to write a new fic with an original character in, say, the Stargate: SG-1 fandom, you'll already find them there. We just ask that you designate these with something like "Character Name (Original Character)", or "Character (Original Female Character)" or even "Character Name (OMC)" or the like. That OMC, OFC, or Original triggers us that we don't have to spend 15 minutes searching the web trying to figure out who the character is.

Questions? We're here!

Oh, and while we have your attention, if anyone is interested in being a tag wrangler, please drop us a note! We'd be happy to have the help.

I thought I'd drop a quite clarification on "special" tags, meaning tags that indicate a character has more than one "personality"/"ego", etc like superheroes.

First, these tags should already be broken up into three tags themselves. Such as "Clark Kent | Superman" exists as a tag, but it's also broken down into "Clark Kent" as well as a "Superman" tag. So in essence for these characters (superheroes, mostly) you can tag appropriately. Like if Clark Kent is dating Lois Lane and Lois doesn't know Clark's alter ego, you can tag the fic with "Clark Kent/Lois Lane". Likewise, if Lois Lane is dating Superman, but doesn't know his alter ego is Clark Kent, you can tag the fic "Superman/Lois Lane". Or - if either A) Lois Lane knows Clark Kent's alter ego or you you just want to tag it as such, you can just use "Clark Kent | Superman/Lois Lane" as the relationship tag. A secondary partner not knowing a superhero's identity can be a whole thing in fandom.

Second, if you're creating a new "dual personality"/"dual ego" character, please make sure to put spaces on either side of the pipe ("|") symbol. This is because the software tries to blend that symbol in with the character's name, so in the Archive software, "Clark Kent|Superman" looks like one character, whereas "Clark Kent | Superman" looks like separate characters in one tag. Most of these tags have already been fixed to have a space, but if not, we'll clean them up soon enough.

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly Contest post, here are the winners for May, 2023

On May 14th user MidnightKaito posted a work called Do You Hear the People Sing?

On May 21st anonymous user Cam left a comment on BettaAzul's workAs the World Falls Down. note: This is our very first non-English comment winner!

Each user will be contacted asap about their win.

As with previous changes to categories, The Books & Literature category has been updated to Books & Literature & Legends. We have quite a few religious and legend based fics, which always teetered on the edge of the category. This rename fixed that.

If anyone has further suggestions or questions, please feel free to reach out!

Because there are quite a few items that don't quite fit the definition of some of our categories, we're going to be updating some of our main media categories to reflect that truth. Therefore, "TV Shows" will become "TV and Streaming Video" and "Video Games" will become "Gaming". The former is because things like Watcher or College Humor/Dropout are fandoms that qualify to be under the "TV" category, but aren't on TV. Likewise, in the latter, there are some board games (the life of me, I can't remember the name of at the moment) that should qualify just as much as a video game - so it makes sense to put them both under "Gaming".

There may be some awkwardness with how the site is indexed for the next couple of hours. But after Sunday morning maintenance, things should once again be stable.

With regards to SquidgeWorld Archive and AI, I've written a blog post over on the Squidge.org Blog. You can find it by clicking this link.

Questions? You can leave a comment here or over on the Squidge.org Blog.