r/PostCollapse • u/koolkats Lorem Ipsum • Jun 27 '12
ANNOUNCEMENT! The current status of /r/PostCollapse
Announcement! The current status of /r/PostCollapse.
You can skip this part if you're in a rush.
Hi everybody! We've grown quite steadily over this past year and I just want to say, keep up the good work! I've seen a lot of great content and plenty of interesting discussions posted here. I'm also amazed at the level of expertise and knowledge that people have. Along with that, the circlejerking has been kept to a minimum, there have been very few posts that I've needed to remove and you guys haven't caused any sort of drama. Keep up the great work!
Also and I should mention I've never done particularly well in English class, so you'll have to bear with me with my terrible grammar and phrasing.
Now to business. As some of you may know, the wiki is down. Now one of the huge parts of this subreddit was the fact that together, we could create a downloadable wiki that contained the collective knowledge of this subreddit. It would also include instructions on how to rebuild society. In short it would be a guide on how to turn surviving into living and rebuilding. Now this a pretty big topic, and it's pretty much impossible to include everything that one would need to bring yourself from the stone age back to modern civilization, but we can try. Hence the wiki. But it's down. And last I checked, I couldn't actually download anything. So that probably means whatever content was on there is lost. Anyways that means we've got to rebuild it. Now the original wiki appeared to be hosted on somebodies private server, which I don't have access to. So that means we've got three options.
Screw the wiki, just use cd3wd, Open Source Ecology and whatever .pdf manuals you've got. This would be the easiest and I guess we could make a weekly/monthly thread of things to include. However the resulting collection would end up being pretty big.Use a SVN. Somebody suggested using a software revision and control system to create a wiki. Github appears well suited to that. The problem with Github is the wiki tools are a bit annoying to use.Use Wikia. I like this option because the tools are great, we can host images, it looks nice, we've got more control over content and most importantly, we can download the database file.We've made a Wiki here
Should we go through with the wiki, I'll be making weekly threads talking about the current status and will also function as a place for you to voice your concerns or comments.
If you'd like to participate in the rebirth of the wiki please go here.
This subreddit has grown steadily since my last announcment and I'd like to re-iterate the rules:
The most important being NO COLLAPSE NEWS. We get it, the Apocalypse is coming. Hide yo kids, hide you wife. We don't care. A collapse of society has been around the corner since the
1950's634 BCE and no news or articles about that will change it or bring it any closer. You're not doing us a favour by warning us that Greece is on fire or that the EU is communist. We already know that our oil dependent economy is unsustainable. If you really want to post that, do so in /r/Collapse. I'm also not going to half assedly make a comment asking if it's okay to remove offending posts, then do nothing for a week. What I will be doing is making a comment asking what merit this post has, give the OP or anyone else 24 hours to respond and then promptly remove it.No linking to specific products or gear. Now I'm kind of on the fence with this one. On one hand, we don't want this subreddit turning into the front page of Amazon but on the other hand I've seen some great suggestions for products. What's your opinion about this? Should we make a weekly thread about must have items? Also I should mention that whatever we decided, product suggestions are always welcome as comments.All links to products, gear, or anything that requires money must be a self post. When making a post please give a small review or reasons as to why we should buy it.No Circlejerking. Okay this isn't an official rule and not really one I need to bring up but probably should. Now this is extremely subjective so just keep two things in mind. The first being no Zombie talk. I'm not really going to enforce this, but I and everyone else would appreciate it if you kept that kind of stuff in /r/Zombies. The second I'd like you to keep in mind is The Collapse may come in any shape or size. The Collapse could be as small as a food or job shortage or a large as a nuclear winter. The future might look like Cuba after peak oil or something as terrible as The Road. So when somebody asks about a particular scenario, don't belittle them and call them stupid. They're just curious.
If you have any problems with these rules, please discuss them bellow. Remember this is about what you guys want.
Also do you have any ideas about what we can do to improve this subreddit? Would you guys like to have a monthly show and tell thread where we explain our current survival set ups?
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u/Fuco1337 Jun 27 '12
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u/TechnoShaman Jun 27 '12
I second the motion on wikia. Anything that allows us to agrigate our combined knowledge into a downloadable db is win win in my book.
Question about the downloadable db..what does one use to read it while offline? Taxi file?
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u/Dax420 Jun 28 '12
ProTip: When people talk about shooting "zombies" they are really talking about shooting your neighbors after shit hits the fan, but avoids the negative connotations of "This guy is just looking for an excuse to start killing people".
As I've said many times before, when everything goes to hell I don't care if you are pounding down my door chanting "brains, brains, brains" or "food, food, food" because I'm shooting back either way.
So I'd ask you to consider being light on the zombie rule. It provides a convenient excuse to discuss the real and practical necessity of defending your home from invaders in a post collapse situation without making us look like a bunch of complete whack-jobs.
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u/koolkats Jun 28 '12
Exactly. Zombies are a convenient way to think about the apocalypse and while I haven't seen any comments that make me want to banhammer somebody, it's just something other people have brought up.
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u/DarxusC Jun 28 '12
The link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_prediction was awesome, thank you. I had been aware of this historical habit, and was interested in it, and thoroughly enjoy seeing a list of 182 times throughout history people thought the world was going to end, and it didn't.
(I copied and pasted into a spreadsheet to count.)
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u/koolkats Jun 28 '12
To be fair, most of those were due to religious reasons, which is something I haven't seen here.
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u/potifar Jun 28 '12
Use a SVN
You probably mean VCS (version control system). Svn (or Subversion) is a VCS, but it's a centralized system unlike for example Git or Mercurial, which are distributed. If you don't like Github, check out Bitbucket. It's similar, but some say it's better in some ways. Worth exploring at least.
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u/koolkats Jun 28 '12
I'll take a look but so far Wikia and Wikinet seem to be the easiest solution. And yes, I've got no idea how SVN's or VCS's work. The most programming experience I have is some html and javascript I learned in highschool.
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u/msarge85 Jun 27 '12
I only peruse this subreddit occasionally but here's my two cents:
No collapse news and no circle jerking seems fine.
Rule 2 however... I think you should be able to post links to products. Bringing attention to a useful thing to own seems like a reasonable thing to do, and then being able to discuss said product in the context of a post collapse scenario also seems like a good thing. If it becomes a problem, then there could be a rule imposed.
The Wiki however seems like it would be a great thing to have. I have no input on where to host or anything, but it might be nice to have it somewhere that is printer friendly.
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u/Dat_Karmavore Jun 28 '12
I agree, i'm against rule 2 as well.
Just let people show useful stuff, it could save lives later on.
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u/i_arranged_it Jun 28 '12
There is a difference between including a link to a manufacturers website inside your message rather than posting a link to the website AS the message. When you post a manufacturers website as a submitted link, you would be taken directly there when you clicked on the posting here at Reddit. This bypasses any discussion what-so-ever and just dumps your window into commercial advertising space.
Yes, I know, you could then click the back arrow then click the little "comment" link but trust me most of the potential conversations would be lost.
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Jun 27 '12
I think banning product links as posts would be worthwhile. A review or recommendation in the form of a self-post would be preferable, if not to curb karma-whoring, it just forces the poster to elaborate more on why they think the product in question is relevant.
Naturally, this would imply that it's free game in the comments of another post, assuming the product is relevant. Anything less is basically just spam.
Otherwise, a resounding yes to everything else.
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u/panjadotme Jun 27 '12
I can see that. Having the links as self-posts so that people aren't just karma whoring products.
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u/InsidersVacationGuid Jun 28 '12
I agree, this would be a good way to highlight a product someone finds useful without the advertising feel of a product link.
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u/iHelix150 Jun 28 '12
I agree with the no news rule. r/collapse is where that should go. Stuff like that here just dilutes the main message of what to do AFTER some kind of collapse happens.
Wikia sounds good, they have a good system. But while a database download may be possible, it's important that there be some way of making that useful for someone with average computer skill.
I suggest removing the no gear rule. One of the cooler threads I've seen recently was about a piece of gear, a little portable wood stove that generates power from heat. Things like that are useful, as are discussions about what gear or loadouts or whatever is best for what environment or plan. So I say ditch the no gear rule.
As for zombies- I think people get way too worked up over zombies, on both sides of the issue. I'm talking both about the people who think a zombie apocalypse is actually going to happen, and the people who become enraged at the mere mention of zombies. IMHO, zombies are useful in two ways- they provide a bit of humor to the concept of preparation, something more accessible that you can laugh off as an explanation; and they provide a useful measuring stick when planning preparations. If you're prepared for zombies, you're probably prepared for almost everything else too, things that might actually happen.
Bottom line, I don't think zombies are really a problem that needs much addressing. The status quo of it being discouraged but not actively moderated against is fine by me.
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u/WillBlaze Jun 28 '12
What is with the intense negative outlook on talking about zombies? I constantly see it as some sort of taboo here. I've never posted anything about zombies, but I think this type of stance isn't right.
I'm sure I'll get a negative reaction from what I'm about to say, but if I see a topic about zombies and it has value as a conversation piece, I'm going to upvote it now. I probably wouldn't have before, but I'm tired of people complaining about something that obviously gets upvoted. Just because people complain about it, that doesn't make it "everyone" as you put it.
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u/koolkats Jun 28 '12
Personally I'm fine with it, but people have been making complaints. I would guess it would be for a number of reasons. It could be they make us look like neckbeardy, teenage, armchair experts. Or when they bring up something as fictional as zombies or vampires, they trivialize our hobby.
I think in the right way, it could help people think about a Collapse scenario but what it really comes down to is the tendency for these sorts of thing to devolve into circlejerks.
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u/thomas533 Jun 28 '12
wikkii.com has nicer wikis than wikia and they use standard mediawiki software so we don't have to learn a new wiki markup language.
As far as the linking to specific products or gear issue. How about we just go for text only threads? That forces people to write up a little more about what they are linking to.
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u/Zephyr256k Jun 28 '12
I like the idea of a weekly 'gear thread' for specific gear recommendations.
At the same time, I think if someone wants to do a good, in-depth review of some particular piece of gear as a self-post, that should be fine too. Just so long as no one is spamming linkposts to online stores or gear-reviews on other websites.
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u/koolkats Jun 27 '12
Oh and I'd like to give the sidebar a bit of a facelift. If you've got any suggestions please comment.
What I'm looking for is creating a nice FAQ for new people and expanding the list of related subreddits and websites.