ec2-18-217-228-35.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Anybody know what happened to the CURS library? I'm missing a couple of books and I know I wouldn't have thrown them out, but they may have got mixed up with the library / I decided to donate them when I had it in my spare room. Of course they may still turn up, but in case they don't, is there is list anywhere of what was in it at the last stocktake?
It's okay, the one I was concerned about has turned up during a clear-out of the spare room. You can all stop panicking.
A Society for Roleplayers who are/were/might be/know members of CambridgeUniversity.
We hold weekly events (theoretically) every term which are open to all who want to join in. As these events frequently require booking of and paying for rooms we tend to ask for membership fees in the order of £5 for a year or £8 for life. But that shouldn't stop non-members turning up if they want to; just don't be suprised if the secretary or treasurer politey ask if you would care to join at some point.
Games played include pretty much everything. From tabletop DungeonsAndDragons to LARP. We don't tend to exclude a game on the basis that it's the "wrong" type of roleplaying or anything silly like that (insert joke about that kind of RolePlaying here).
a) To put people who want to play games in touch with people who want to run games. This is usually done through the society squash during freshers' week (and in more recent years the second squash at the start of Lent), the society newsletter, the society [wiki] and the society webpage.
b) To provide one-off RolePlaying events and socials for members such as the weekly one-offs, the 24-hour dungeon (of which the past 4 neither featured dungeons nor lasted for 24 hours) and the annual dinner and punt-party.
The society also has an online game (which has its own ucam newsgroup - UcamSocietiesCursGame) which has suffered intermittant membership these past few years.
More information on /Events will be posted when term has started.
The Society can be contacted by emailing either the President Ewan Clark or the Secretary Jack Levell King DJ (jwl30@cam).
/Events page now has events on it. (One-Offs this Wednesday)
CURS is now in existance on the srcf IRC server, kern.srcf.ucam.org
StuartFraser recently came into possession of a huge sheaf of /Quotes from CURS; they seem old but are highly amusing. They will be uploaded as a procrastination measure.
Question: Would the people responsible for keeping ToothyWiki <insert bowing and scraping here> up and running object if we started posting links to it in CURS e-mails (which have 100-200 recipients but are probably read by a lot less). It may get more people onto the Wiki but I'm not sure if that's what you want or the way you'd want it done. (Also makes it damm easy to put directions to our stuff on the web)
CURS has a perfectly good web page of its own. Why on Earth would you not use that for notices and information?
By multiple users, on forbidding pages of html - yes. --Vitenka
Who mentioned multiple users? You only need the secretary to collate and put up all the information. --ChiarkPerson
You asked what advantages there were, I listed them. I presumed that a party of the long standing problem with the CURS WebSpace? was that only the secretary could access it. To be generous, the secretary is overworked. To be less generous, the secretary is sometimes impossible to find and irresponsibly slow about putting things onto the page. Plus it is highly advantageous to split the workload of maintaning a site across multiple people. Those are all CMS arguments, I note. I did not (yet) make the assumption that it would be a mass public editing forum. I make that assumtion further down the page. CURS doesn't even have a forum (last I looked) for crying out loud. Wikis make good forums. --Vitenka
Hmp. Possible problems: lots of newbies all at once would put a big strain on the street sweepers; a large influx of visitors all talking about a particular very narrow range of subjects might make it rather boring for the rest of us.. What do people think? - are we big enough to cope? - MoonShadow
Re: narrow range of subjects - not everyone here watches Anime, but we cope... ;) And I'm sure that CURS people won't mind joining in the other discussions. --M-A
I was going to say the same as M-A. People are used to filtering out pages they're not bothered about. I can't imagine how boring EO Epoch2 etc got for non-ElementalOblivion players. We can probably leave the sweeping of the CURS pages to people who participate on their pages. I might suggest making sure that from one or two of the main CURS entry point pages there's a prominent link to WhatIsWiki or similar. Beyond that, I think we'll be fine, and more people is good... --AlexChurchill
Hmph.. I guess boring isn't quite what I was trying to get across. See above for my response to ChiarkPerson. - MoonShadow
If we can filter and if the server doens't slow to a crawl, the addition of a hundred new people would be tolerable I think. You'd get only ten or so contributing and probably only two or three actually going over the old ground. Um. That would be if normal people got linked to the wiki. If you link curs people, I don't know what will happen. --Vitenka
You'd get MoonShadow asking you to buy him a new computer, I suspect... -- Senji
I'm less concerned with the effect on the Wiki than the effect on CURS of making the source of information a Wiki run and written mostly by people who know each other, which looks scary and intimidating at first glance and may well put of people who look at it and think 'oh my goodness, they all know each other/I could never keep up with all that stuff' and just leave without giving it a second chance. If something bad happens to the Wiki, you can just switch off the computer or delete it all and start again. CURS on the other hand has been here longer than the Wiki. - ChiarkPerson
My sentiments, understandably, are exactly opposite to yours, but I think we share a goal here. - MoonShadow
I point out that this is a true fact about CURS though... --Vitenka
More to the point, CURS is CURS, not ToothyWiki / CURS, and it's as well to remember that it's a university society open to all and beware of even giving the impression, however mistaken, that it's the province of a clique who all know each other and use the same computer system which is full of in-jokes. CURS will still be here long after you all have left for pastures new, as long as it remains an actual society and not a clique that people are afraid of joining because they think everyone knows each other and that in order to participate they have to take part in Wiki discussions. However true that may or may not be, let's not give anyone even the slightest reason to think it. - ChiarkPerson
A jolly good point, which also applies to some extent in reverse (ToothyWiki is ToothyWiki, not CURS / ToothyWiki; if we get a sudden crowd of CURS people that looks like it would number more than triple the current population of active ToothyWikizens, the wiki would be in serious danger of turning into CURS / ToothyWiki, IMO. Even though there are closed discussions at the moment - EO, M:tG, anime - they are a small enough proportion of the whole that there is still something there for people that aren't interested in them. Are we big enough for this to still be the case if triple digits of CURS people join? BTW, if the CURS people have their own server, why not run a CURS wiki there? If we're interested in socialising, we could crosslink heavily and grab people that way - both from here for there and vice versa; this would seem to be a way to avoid the swamping issues.. - MoonShadow
Seems like the most elegant solution, but beware - a DeadWiki? can be more forbidding than nothing, and no-one knows what makes a wiki work. Having said that, it's still a useful CMS to have, for page maintainers. --Vitenka
Why on Earth does CURS need a Wiki at all? It's survived thus far without one, and I fail to see what would actually be put on it. For announcements of events, directions and sign-up sheets what you want is a ssingle point: a person to whom people can send things, who will then put them up on the web in a coherent format rather than the hard-to-read anarchy of most of the Wiki pages. What do you expect to go on a CURS Wiki that would even be best servec by a Wiki, let alone need one? --ChiarkPerson
Exactly what you said - only from community members rather than from a single point of failure. A wiki may not be the best way to do it (should people really be able to edit each others campaign details? Tradeoff, of course, is that you don't need to jump through hoops to contribute) but it is certainly more inviting than some other formats. There is a possible lack of power - a wiki doesn't easily let you have a nicely formatted page - but for quick messages it could be useful. Worth considering useful, anyway. --Vitenka
I have seen arguments for making the CURS home page a wiki, but not for making it this particular wiki. How about someone running a new wiki on a seperate machine or port number? --DR
Gah! A number of good points here (I forgot to check the Wiki after I posted this. Let this be a warning to all non-RecentChangesAddicts). While the possiblity of using the Wiki as a CURS webpage/forum was certainly one thing I mentioned and considered doing, I should perhaps have mentioned that my intention was to point to the Wiki as more of a "this is a cool site you might want to check out" than a "this is where we're posting our updates" thing. Although it handily doubles as this. The CURS notification situation is worse than Vitenka mentioned. The Website is the responsibility of the Assistant Secretary, the e-mails are the responsibility of the Secretary and the booking of rooms is currently being handled by the President via several intermediaries. This makes us look less reliable than we actually are because the only person with access to change all these facilities is me and I only do that when it becomes so urgent it's too late because I don't want to tread on other people's toes. --Edith
As for the CURS forum, we have a newsgroup, which was last used about 3 years ago. A CURS wiki would be difficult to set up (I have no idea how to run/maintain one and we'd need to find someone to run it permanently or suffer the vagueries of a computer which moved term-to-term). Again, I wasn't planning a take-over of ToothyWiki for CURS evil purpose. Simply putting like-minded people in touch with each other. I think getting the newsgroup or an IRC channel going might be the best solution for a CURS forum. But we'd need someone who wasn't permanently pretending to be busy to do and I'm just not that man right now. Suggestions on how to kick life into a CURS forum of any kind are always welcome. Someone actually taking the initiative and doing it are even better. --Edith
For the moment I'll leave ToothyWiki pointers off the CURS e-mail until someone tells me otherwise. --Edith
The following was sent to the CURS committee; I'd like wider opinion on the idea though --Edith
I'd like to discuss this at the meeting if we can. But I've put it up for open discussion on a few other forums to gauge wider opinion (which we probably need to know to make any decision).
For those of you who do not read [megatokyo] I recommend it. As do a large number of other people. It mentions leet speak (sorry, L33T 5P34K) and is generally so widely known on the internet they even sell T-shirts on [Thinkgeek] In short, we share similar markets for readers/members in the University.
Now, I point people to: [this page] and note that they are selling a small amount of ad space at the bottom of their comic for $15 a day for a minimum of 2 days. And it is currently free.
I think you can work out what's next:
Why doesn't CURS rent said ad space to advertise our squash (or possibly a second squash next term). Yes, they'll be lots of people it won't apply to, but then again there are quite a few geek-types who read Megatokyo and aren't members (and perhaps aren't even aware) of CURS in the university.
This will give us the following advantages that I can see:
Visibility to a much wider range of people
Kudos of advertising on Megatokyo ("hey, if they like that, maybe they're my kind of people")
The possibility of reaching people that isn't through posters, slides in lectures, the fair, word of mouth or flyers. Don't underestimate the power of this. (And yes, we'll be considering those methods as well)
Several of these factors might also attract other societies. We might be able to split the advertising and thus the cost (although we probably don't want to share with more than say two others or the impact will be lost, plus we'll run out of space). I'm mainly think CUCAS here but other societies might apply. We might want to do a joint meeting to cover this. Maybe a showing of an anime followed by a few related games might work. Hell, that alone is probably worth doing, the megatokyo advertising just means that more people show up.
Anyway, something to ponder. I'll throw this up on ToothyWiki and the newsgroup for discussion so we can see what the outside world thinks.
Seems reasonable. The target audience is no smaller than that of a number of other MegaTokyo supporters' ads. I'd imagine sharing links with CUCAS would be a good idea. You'd want to try to choose a sequence of days when a number of CambridgeStudents are likely to check MegaTokyo. The only main problem I can think of: what proportion of (people in Cambridge who like roleplaying but don't come to CURS) are actually unaware of CURS, as opposed to just being too busy? --AC
Probably not as many as I suspect. However this is where the cool factor comes into play. Many people are aware of CURS but don't show up. Advertising an event on Megatokyo might grab their attention better than the usual stuff we put out. Particularly if it looks cool --Edith
In a way it sounds like you'd be advertising your advertisement ("Hey! Go look at Megatokyo to see our ad!") but other than that it sounds quite good. I was thinking of suggesting it for Toothycat at some point... Splitting might be a bad move though. You only have 234x60 so you can't have too much text on-image and where would you link it to? --Kazuhiko
Make it a general "you're coming to cambridge? Might want to look here" and point it at a srcffy page? --Delph
We'd go for text if anything. Banners cost more. Thus space is not an issue (kinda) --Edith
The CU computer gaming society might also be in for some sharing (going on the numbers of people who play q3 and read MegaTokyo (but i'm not sure if (we)they have a budget) --Delph
I've considered it for toothycat before now, but I amn't sure how well it would cope with the slashdot effect. That is something you might want to think about with regard to wherever you end up pointing the CURS one at.. - MoonShadow
The opinion from the srcf types seems to be: Yeah, it might crash apache but probably not kern (thus they won't lose their IRC). They don't seem too disturbed by the idea. We'd just have to make sure we keep the page graphics minimum. Probably not too much of an issue. --Edith
Is there a webserver that's got less "useful" pages on it than the srcf, if you're worried about taking out apache(or whatever), Find a poor soul with a machine in cambridge but without any content to serve off it. --Delph
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