@ArtOfCode, and others with editor privileges on the blog: if I've done this right, you should see a submission on the blog. As an editor I could just publish it, I think, but let's use this to learn how the tools work. Please let me know if you see something there.
In my answer, worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/23827/9685, I tried to write China and then Japan in Kanjis in the Japanese examples but was told that the first character for China, as well as the first character for Japan were not allowed. Is there any restriction on the use of Kanjis on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange?
@HDE226868 well I can't show it here, but when I had the kanjis for China, it complained about the first one. When I replaced to Japan, it also complained about the first kanji for Japan. Then I removed all kanjis and it worked
@HDE226868 might be... but it was too late for me to play around. I wonder how the Japanese SE or SO in Japanese do... may be they have another plugins.
I might add, that I did not try to post with the kanji in, but a red note appeared to say that such character was not allowed in body of the post
@ArtOfCode I'm working on a blog post about habitability around other stars, and describing where the best places would be for life around different ones.
@Green You were bound to get something, although there are more than I expected.
@HDE226868 Answers are easier for me. Working off someone else's requirements and constraints is somehow easier than coming up with a good question to ask.
@HDE226868 to create a post ("story"), click on your gravatar on the top right to get the menu and then click "new story". When done typing (or pasting), I clicked on something along the lines of "submit to publication", which apparently sent notifications to the other editors. @bilbo_pingouin can tell us what happened from there.
@ArtOfCode is the owner; several others of us are editors. Despite the name "editor", I think we should go very light on edits, especially for creative works (as opposed to, say, essays). Think "editor" as in "gatekeeper", not "editor" as in "red pen". That said, fixing obvious typos is a win.
@HDE226868 yup. I've seen some gorgeous stuff there. Haven't checked for licensing terms, but if they allow free use...
Also not trying to be a pest about images; I'm not one of those people who thinks the Internet has to be made of pictures. In this case, though, it seemed like it'd be a nice addition, if there's something suitable without too much work.
@HDE226868 ah, ok. Medium's help page on images links to some collections of freely-usable images, but I haven't tried searching those. Wikimedia would be a good place to look.
It looks like most recent APotD pics are copyrighted, actually. There was a time when they were posting a lot from Hubble and I think those weren't. Eh, pretty to look at either way! :-)
@HDE226868 You're an "editor", which we're calling "curator" because that's more like what it is. I'm the "owner", nominally - but I'm not planning on advertising that because it should be community owned.
@MonicaCellio I saw that HDE's post was published, but in any case if someone still wonders: on Medium I got a message in the mailbox (top-right) green. Clicked on it, read Monica's post, and I had a "Publish" button (top-right). And that's about it.
@bilbo_pingouin thanks for the info. I think @HDE226868 self-published his post -- that is, published directly instead of submitting. Or, at least, as an editor I never saw a notice of it. (This is not a complaint. It's good for us to test all the paths.)
BTW, sometime this week I'm hoping to post a "commentary" post to go with the chapter I posted. This'll be the "how I used Worldbuilding" and some of the design intent and stuff.
@MonicaCellio Apparently, yes. I had pretty much no idea how to use/find most of the tools because of browser issues and switching from one to the other, and the assorted confusion. I published first and associated second.
@ArtOfCode That took a hard fight and multiple meta posts to get. I'm still not aware of the specifics; I don't think the mods have disclosed the precise request to Stack Exchange.
Since we're not using that, I wondered if the team would be able to activate the block that contains it, and instead put in an embedded thing for our blog.
@HDE226868 ah, and I submitted without publishing (I think!), so its first appearance on Medium was when it hit the blog. That was counter-intuitive, by the way, and I was partly doing it to explore the menus.
OS are getting a special help page. Law got their disclaimer. A number of sites have something that's a little out of the ordinary - if the functionality is there, it might be worth asking.
In the short term we'll have a "happy birthday" meta post which will heavily promote the blog, and we'll feature that. So that'll get it in front of people for a month. I think after that we'll have some info about blog usage patterns, which should help us ask SE for that.
@ArtOfCode right. I want to see our users engage with the blog first -- readers and writers. (Did you see that we get readership stats?) Right now meta gives us a way to encourage that, so we can use meta now to jump-start things. Once that starts to fade, we'll be ready to talk about next steps.
I think that question is off-topic because it's not about world building. It's asking someone to provide three images of a Mercator projection on three arbitrary points.
@Green is probably a good starting point to know about research done. But I'm pretty sure, it would not pass the skeptics filter
yes as @HDE226868 writes, see if they have some sources mentioned. If they do, go to the real research
I found an answer for the mercator question...
answered. If someone +1 my answer, we get rid of it on the unanswered. :D I still think VTC it for "not about worldbuilding" is a bit stretched. But that's just my opinion...
Dang. I was rereading that question and though "Oh, it's a question about how to depict a local star group".....oh wait, it's asking for the physics behind how to build a local star cluster. @HDE226868, that's all you.
As of this posting (9/1/2015), there are six unanswered questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange:
Karyotypes of partially interbreeding human races
Creating a realistic world(s) map - Stars
Could life exist in a circumstellar disk?
Liquid-filled habitats on high-G planets and on ships that acc...
@WorldbuildingMeta @HDE226868, they also had some very limited number of views. I think they came in the middle of a frenzy strikes of exciting questions and were deemed... well, less exciting.
@Green reasonable enough.
@ArtOfCode good. And is there a chance we get to choose?
@bilbo_pingouin I'd imagine so, if we put this forward and say "this is what we'd like, here's the source so you can verify that we're not trying to break things", they'd take it
@bilbo_pingouin Both. Monica suggests we get the blog launched with the birthday celebrations, and see what kind of usage patterns we get, then use that data as well to support our case.
@bilbo_pingouin please hold off on the meta post. Let's get the blog up and running first and then ask for a prominent link. It's easier to sell that way.
@ArtOfCode Well for me, since you wrote that HTML example earlier, and contacted someone about it, it was logical to make the next step. But I don't mind doing it (when the time comes), if you'd rather have it that way :-)
Hey @JoelSpolsky, the Worldbuilding guys have noticed my mischief here, and I've been told that they think we should get graduation as a birthday present... :)
Seriously, though, we're doing great and I suspect we'll have one of the faster paths to graduation, but there are lots of other sites waiting too, it won't hurt us to wait, and we do still have some things we can work on to make WB even more awesome.
@ArtOfCode we can close and open, but are we fixing them? What can we do to be more clear up front to reduce the number of cycles? Things like that, I meant.
(But yeah, we're ahead of some beta sites that don't have active reviewers/closers/reopeners/editors.)
@ArtOfCode it looks like you've recovered from that, actually, and since we can't control what other people do, there's really no blame to be handed out here. It's frustrating when something like that happens, kind of like having a coupon for a really awesome deal but it turns out it was a misprint and the store isn't going to honor it, but what can you do?
@ArtOfCode come back to the fun side. We blow up worlds and overthrow governments and stuff here! (NSA observers: only the bad ones, of course, and only virtually.)
@MonicaCellio it might interest you to know that we've had problems with the same user in OS. Also, look at their IPs and compare them to mine; I've figured out who it is (IRL) based on that.
Turns out it's a neighbour (we have a shared wifi network between a small area around me (10 houses ish), which I administrate).
I have a neighbour who likes to be called what they call themselves in their username here.
I don't actually know if they know it's me, though.
The best actual worldbuilding question... Some of Serban's posts have really been good. The making a realistic map series is good, and there are a number of posts about the tech development of a world that I've liked.
I'd have to have a better look through the site to decide on a best, because there are lots of good sets. I'll do that tomorrow, and nominate a single post then.
As of this posting (9/1/2015), there are six unanswered questions on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange:
Karyotypes of partially interbreeding human races
Creating a realistic world(s) map - Stars
Could life exist in a circumstellar disk?
Liquid-filled habitats on high-G planets and on ships that acc...
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor