But before anything, many thanks to Soph, you're awesome and we'd never have this without you. Really, really thank you.
Ok... So I have a copy of the logs now, and we were talking about censoring the personal and rule-breaking content out so we could release them for public view. But why?
I believe we can all agree that we'd not do it for ourselves. We were there, we lived through it, we don't need to read it. Although it might be enjoyable to actually read through eventually, we don't want to release them purely out of vanity here. We want to release them so that future readers of the ARGs archives are allowed access to the whole content.
So, the reason to publish is to enable outsiders to access. In order to do we have to think about them, and not us. That's my baseline here. You'll see what I mean shortly. I now have to share you some data.
I used these few days to run some statistics on the logs. There are 11757 full pages of content. Split into 79 files, one for each day from creation to January 14th, one day after the Post-Mortem Lock. The actual content averages 50436 words per day. The page number was tested with Times New Roman 12, and this version of the logs was rebuilt by Soph, with IP addresses and technical status messages removed already. This volume is really all due to our talking, name changes and time stamps.
What this means for those who don't really get the magnitude of the numbers? NaNoWriMo defines that a full-length novel is a narrative with a minimum length of 50000 words. Which applied to above, means we've talked one whole novel each day. We have 79 novels worth of chat content. Just let that sink in before you continue reading.
We publish for the sake of those who aren't familiar, so that they can enjoy the work. Apply that to you. Say we do censor out personal information and get it up. You decide to read about, say, Slender-man. Get into Slendernation and they point you to eleven thousand pages of content, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with the mythos. Would you read that?
Going through the log in that manner is, simply put, stupid. It's a massive undertaking for nothing.
There's still one possibility, but a very small one, to make something out of this. Much like Morgan's visit, we could get excerpts from the logs. Slices of the relevant content. Provided we remember something that was talked, I could easily Ctrl+F to it. Extract the relevant conversation entries and censor, if necessary, that block alone. It's just grunt work as long as we remember something about what we want to get. If we can use the forum time stamps to zoom in on the date, then the process is as straightforward as it gets, without requiring anyone to go through 79 novels.
But even that has a problem. Get too many slices and we'll end up with some nine thousand pages, turning back to the same problem. One hundred pages is already a lot. Even considering the chat format, that's more pages than we'd get if we combined all of our TvTropes pages regarding the game. And they do a much better job at telling a story than the chat log could possibly do.
Ultimately, I don't think it's worth releasing it for public view at all. But, if we do remember anything that happened there, and only there, that is highly relevant and worthy of a mention, then it's possible to extract it. In order to cut down redundancy and the final page to a minimum, this shouldn't include anything that we already brought to the forums in some form or another or any of the usual chatroom madness. And I do think that 100 pages are a fair limit for the excerpt, in total, considering the view of someone reading through the archives for the ARG's story.
Besides, if we, working together, don't remember something... Is it really worthy trying to unearth it?
Just to reassure you guys, it'll never be destroyed. My own copy would require me, my computer and Google to die an horrible death in order to become inaccessible. And Soph surely has her own measures of backup in place too. I'm not saying that we shouldn't preserve them, I'm just saying that it's silly and borderline insane to try to read through it and try to filter it for the general public.
It would attract visitors here just to see if the eleven thousand pages log is real or not. ._. But no one would read it.
Laconic: The logs are gigantic. Not really worth to release them as they are. Extract pieces? Drop the project? Plunge ahead and go through all of it anyway?
But, I did sweep the Timeline for chat mentions looking for the entries that would require a log excerpt, so here's what I found.
