unforum

[Dorkmaster]

[RESOURCE/INFO/META] Fireflies Wiki is now up! (and why)

[vpisteve]

Great job guys! Again, not to diminish any other work done elsewhere, the more resources the better.

[Dorkmaster]

Thanks! That's EXACTLY how we feel! We don't want this to be the "exclusive" anything. Just as a factual and uncluttered (we hope) resource that you can always turn to in your ILB arsenal!

[colin]

Previous games have had guides written by one or a few people. i've said before that i don't particularly like the wiki idea, letting anyone edit anything is expecting to much of people like steve said there's no harm in having more resources

[MNPundit]

[thebruce]

the software, or the layout? the layout is controlled by us... personally, I thought the new wiki that netninja is using (regardless of their own layout) is MUCH less user friendly... perhaps lighter and faster, but ugly and less versatile... but that's my opinion

[MNPundit]

[thebruce]

just go from the main page... everything's linked there. The News and Game Updates lists events by date, the fact reference has links to all the raw data from the game, there's the game guide, summary and a quick start... everything you need... if you have any suggestions for better organization, then let us know...

[sherpa]

that's interesting, 'cause I can hardly find my way 'round the netninja wiki any more. too much faff and noise, inconsistent naming, weird page names when it was all moved over..

guess it's just a case of better the devil you know..

(and yeah, i have a ton of work this week, so can't contribute to the fireflies wiki - i'm aware there are things i need to update! not to mention the fact that my email has been down for a couple of days too... aargh)

[SuperJerms]

Worth saving

[Astald]

The problem with the NetNinja wiki was the fact that there were people tampering with it that were doing harm, not good. I believe we do need a source of information that will be consistently updated, and I think because of the people involved with the Firefly Wiki, that is what we will get. There are plenty of resources out there though. I personally like the new wiki, and am glad about the work everyone is doing to make this game enjoyable for all.

[Lojack]

Ok, I admit, I'm a total n00b here. (Well, been lurking/reading, not too much posting.) However, thinking about the problem, here's what I came up with.

There needs to be a well organized, easily navigable resource for the game as a record- Fireflies fits this fine, few curators of good standing charged with making it a fact repository.

But people will feel left out and may not likely contribute- so a sort of work in progress wiki needs to be up like the Queen Bee (netninja). Ideally it should be fluid and open, but should concern itself with active topics- current puzzles to be solved, story elements to place. Now the problem that this has is that creep becomes involved and then bam, messy pages.

The message boards at Unfiction are great for spec and just information sharing between folks, but sometimes it's easy to get lost, some of the subject threads run 20+ pages- and trying to find something becomes more daunting when just popping in for a moment becuase of a great idea that popped into your head. So you get many similar threads, trout, general increase of noise to signal, that sort of thing. Plus, not everything can have a sticky status, so unlike a wiki, where you would have a set location to go to, you would have to rely on the search capabilities to find what you want.

Maybe the option would be to have spec areas on the wiki for certain things- say spec page(s) for the Jan storyline- one for her, one for her father, that sort of thing. Keep it loosly maintained, and perhaps less trouting would occur, and more specs of promising status would appear. Just an idea, I'm thinking out loud. Problem is, I'm not sure how much work would be needed for housekeeping on something like that.

[Mr. Munchy]

LoJack, SuperJerms, I agree with what you are saying. The Fireflies wiki is, as others have pointed out, a great factual resource (although I found it hard to navigate, personally), but the NetNinja wiki IS better for speculation and working out puzzles... And it also creates a level of participation for those who cannot be directly in the game (anyone outside of the United States will understand what I am saying), especially after a bunch of those lucky Fireflies editors got to the spiked axons! I know it wasn't intentional, but the Fireflies wiki has left me feeling "out of the game".

[thebruce]

Here's how I see the ilovebees game resources... if you look at argn.com, he's got a list of resources, and each has their specialty...

Personally, I see netninja as the active discussion, 'weeding out' wiki, where anyone can post and edit until a defined resolution is available... because of that, the wiki by nature won't be clean and amazingly well organized, but has a lot of potential for creep and spam and trout and such.

So, enter fireflies wiki... the 'moderated' wiki, where only official information is entered. A static record of the 90th percentile of data, if you will... the top layer of discoveries, spec, fact, documentation. There's the mishmash of new data that's being edited and twisted and spec'd on, and in time, the cream rises to the top, and needs to be organized, so we take it (giving credit where credit is due) and put it into a 'neatified' data source. Fireflies isn't meant for public access, for public modification and updating - that's Netninja. The fireflies members are active members of a number of ilovebees sources, so the information we gather is what we feel is generally accepted fact/spec (the top 10% if you will), from multiple sources, for an organized source.

The unForums and chat really is where the bulk of the action takes place... a great example is the SP puzzles over the past 2 weeks... I think the only action in solving the puzzles happened either in unforum threads or #beekeepers. From there, people updated netninja with working info, and we also updated fireflies with the final results (sometimes the works in progress as well). That's the forum's strength - chatting and discussion in a much more timely manner than a wiki.

Then there are other 3rd party resources, such as guides, axon plotters, phone number locators, my compilations, other things that individuals set up with a specific purpose that doesn't cover the entire game. These are also essential because it offer a function that further speeds up problem solving, references and such, taking pressure off the other major generic sources like the wikis and discussions. They're tools in order to funnel through results, instead of having many places to go, or many discussions, of people trying to figure things out. If one source is better than 10 when they all accomplish the same thing, then do it!

So that's how I view all these different sources we have in the ARG.

In the end, hopefully there will be one source that documents the entire game from beginning to end, like the Beast Trail (which I read all of after starting with ILB in July), and which is why *shameless plug* we set up the Fireflies team, so we'd have a head start in making one source that would contain all thing ilovebees, including archiving all data from the game, all pages, updates, etc... in essence, anyone who goes there, can follow the Trail, and theoretically re-live the entire game in all its glory (except having actually enjoyed being a part of the game)

So there we have it:
unForums, #beekeepers, Fireflies, NetNinja, Dana's Blog, and other specific focused ILB tools and resources.

[thebruce]

appendage:
Netninja and Fireflies can work together. Fireflies isn't there to take away from Netninja. Everyone should be able to take part in the game, and if you want to take part, don't come to Fireflies if you want easy references, quick lookups and such, then come to Fireflies...

As for the 'crash' that Netninja experienced a while back (I was also a heavy user of Netninja before the software change), it was mainly found that due to the size of the database, users who were logged in were causing more calculations to occur because pages weren't cached for logged in users. The traffic itself wasn't really a problem, it was the fact that everyone was logged in. Being logged out, and not forcing the browser to redownload pages every time would take loads of pressure off that version of the wiki.

Fireflies, with 11 people logged in at a time at most, doesn't yet have the traffic problem. Plus, well, I don't know how powerful Extrasonic's web server is so who knows... as of now, there hasn't been a problem... if one does arise, then we'll come up with a way around it...

Plus, if I'm guessing right, the Fireflies wiki is also an updated version of the original Netninja wiki software... netninja used to access all pages as index.php?Title=xxx whereas now the pages are mainly accessed as index.php/xxx so there may be a chance that this wiki version won't suffer the same issues as the origina NN wiki, if that 'bug' was fixed in the updated version... I dunno...

but I'm done now