Topic: Resurrecting the Nomikos Library?

[markc]

IMHO the person you should contact should be Colin At ICE and he will get the info to the right people. But from his recient posts people are on vacation so ti could take sometime.
MDC

[Colin-ICE]

You rang?

I will highlight this thread to the powers that be and get their read on it. As Mark said people are away at the moment so it might take a while for people to reply but I/someone will be in touch.

Thanks

[brandivil]

That's great Colin - thank you!

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

The answer would be yes to resurrection, preferably hosted somewhere on this site, either leveraging the existing WordPress implementation of ironcrown.com or by adding a wiki annex.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[egdcltd]

There are wiki WordPress plugins available, but I don't know if they are any good. The original library was built around WordPress, but I think using that eventually caused problems, which was why it was shut down. So maybe a pure wiki is the way to go.

[brandivil]

How do we restrict access to the Wiki content?  To whom would GM's (assuming they are the ones that have the SW MA proof of purchase) address their request for access authorization?

[Terry K. Amthor]

It would be awesome if this could be made into a wiki, where we could even include illustrations and such. Who wants to take that on?

[egdcltd]

I did start making one on my PC, but never really got anywhere beyond installing the software. You would have problems with a wiki, though, as to really work you'd include a lot of information from the books. You could easily limit access to the entire wiki with password protection, but I don't know if you could restrict access to only certain parts of it. For example, the timeline should have fairly free access, but you wouldn't want everyone - especially Google - to gain access to the specific information from the books.

[Terry K. Amthor]

Yes, previously, we had a protection where you had to answer a question from a book in order to get a login, or something like that, which I think would cover us, as well as plentiful copyright and Trademark notices. And isn't there a way to block search engines from accessing your site? And even if they did, if you clicked, you'd get a Forbidden warning when you tried to jump to a protected page, right?

I think the idea of a Shadow World wiki is really exciting, building on Matt's awesome database, which even I found really useful.

[egdcltd]

Yes, you can tweak the robots.txt file to stop search engines crawling it, but you really need some way of stopping paid content being available for free. You might be able to limit access to certain pages by asking more product related questions each time, but it might be tricky.

I like the idea of a wiki too, but if I was making one it would be like this http://uesp.net or this http://runescape.wikia.com but I have got every SW supplement bar SWMA2 and the original printed Eidolon I think.

[darb]

I don't really understand the security drive here.  What are you planning on putting on the wiki that you would not want to be in the public?  The downside is the wiki cannot function as a way to draw new players in if it is an exclusive club, which is probably a worse outcome than some potential loss of sales because of leaked info.  And the 'answer a question' security key doesn't work so well when there are several possible products to buy, you are limiting the audience even more by narrowing it to a specific purchase.

Why would you not want things like the timeline to be public?  Actually, as long as no one is posting very substantial blocks of text, I really don't see any upside to limiting access.  Additional background info is good for players and not a bad way to entice prospective players. 

[Terry K. Amthor]

I don't really understand the security drive here.  What are you planning on putting on the wiki that you would not want to be in the public?  The downside is the wiki cannot function as a way to draw new players in if it is an exclusive club, which is probably a worse outcome than some potential loss of sales because of leaked info.  And the 'answer a question' security key doesn't work so well when there are several possible products to buy, you are limiting the audience even more by narrowing it to a specific purchase.

Why would you not want things like the timeline to be public?  Actually, as long as no one is posting very substantial blocks of text, I really don't see any upside to limiting access.  Additional background info is good for players and not a bad way to entice prospective players. 

I agree that it could bring people in, but large sections of the timeline are [secret] information only GMs should know, so GMs would no doubt prefer we did not put that out for players to see. And just publishing the entire timeline online is dozens of pages of material; certainly not just a few snippets. Add to that a lot of basic geographic material, stuff about organizations like the Loremasters, and you are talking an entire sourcebook of stuff.

If you put too much material online for free reading, you endanger your copyrights and devalue your for-sale materials. We need to strike a balance, and maybe have a discussion about exactly who this wiki would serve and what our goal is for it.

[darb]

Well, but that amount of material is not a sourcebook, so no lost sales.  What it really could do is show people that Shadowworld is an interesting setting, which could actually lead to more sales.  I do not agree with the devalue of for-sale material.  Settings are made more valuable as the amount of material available increases.  In essence, the value of wikis are that they create value without investment by you.  When community members add information, it makes your products more valuable.  It is a way for your product line to be more active and vital.
Really, making it secret and limited is interesting if it is just for a little clique of GMs, but that is really a recipe for something small and, well limited.  Forgotten realms wiki has been around for 10 years and has 16.5 thousand articles, Pathfinder's  has almost 12 thousand.  Their sales are.... probably something to aspire to. 

But it is your show so I am just putting my opinion out there. I really like your work and would like it to be more exposed.

[brandivil]

Imo, this thread is starting to digress from its original point to marketing (might be a new thread with more hits as a result?).

Back on track then...restricted access area for those who can prove access to have all the relevant books but simply wish to avoid repeating what others may have already done - namely a singular combined encyclopedia of Shadow World including one fully sorted timeline.  That's what I thought we were talking about folks?

[Terry K. Amthor]

This thread kind of died, but I'd like us to talk about the library becoming a wiki, but would it be possible to make all (or better yet parts!?) of it accessible only by password of registered users?

[egdcltd]

Making it all password protected is easy; you can protect the entire directory it is in. Making parts of it protected is probably a lot harder.

[Arc]

I'd be very surprised if you couldn't protect only segments of a wiki, but I'm no expert in these matters so who knows...

Maybe a wiki could also resurrect the ever popular "Ask Andraax"?

[B Hanson]

I thought I would "resurrect" this thread and try and get some more input. We are working on bringing back Matt's Nomikos Library project over at the Rolemasterblog.com. Matt's old files aren't that useful, but I do have the timeline in text format. I'm not sure if Brandivil is still active here, but we encourage anyone that wants to help out! I'm compiling all the Canon SW books and include any other relevant dates that may be interspersed in the books as well.

We wanted to organize or tag material and got a few emails on some ideas (although how to control these accesses still remains unclear):

1. Organize by Common, Educated, Esoteric or Secret.
2. One cool idea was to organize by ranks in Lore: History.
3. Tag by continent, major topics and "GM Only".

Anyone else have thoughts or ideas?

[Peter R]

The basic plan for access, at the moment, seems to be than anyone will be able to read the player information but GMs will need to register and then contact us to request access. We will then change your 'role' on the blog from player to GM.

It is not my intention to use a wiki format. I only play in SW so I could not evaluate any edits. I do not own any SW material except the player's guide and heroes and rogues where the NPCs are SW based.

[starflt]

If you're serious about actually implementing this sort of thing, you'll probably want to use a database back end with a GUI (with the ability to export to .txt or such) in order to provide the selection ability as well as the access limitations.

My first pass at a DB schema would be something like:

Level: Common/Educated/Esoteric/Secret
  OR
HRanks: # of history ranks needed

Location: Kulthea (world-wide)/Emer/Jaiman/etc.
Topics: K'ta'viiri/Altha/Earthwardens/Jerak Arenreth/etc [This could be very long]
Access: Player/GM
[Any other searchable category should be listed here as well with a defined set of values.]
Event: Text of event here (this could be searchable too via the interface)

A lot of the work would be defining all the tag values and getting them associated with the text entries.  The DB and UI itself could use MySQL/Java/Python and probably coded up in a few days at most by any decent programmer; refinements could of course take a long time.

Users would be listed in a separate table along with their permission level; again, easy to set up, but would then take a bit more work if the maintainer(s) wanted a GUI or such and not willing to type raw SQL at a command line.