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UORares.com Updates

JC the Builder

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I have gotten in contact with Xanthar to restore my access to the UORares website. I will be making some changes over the next few weeks to turn the site into a sort of museum of past rare items. It will also include links to newer types of rare items on UOGuide including: event moderator items, rubble, dungeon stealables, etc.

My hope has been that UOGuide could continue on with what UORares did a long time ago in creating a home for players to learn all about rare items and where they came from. There are new items created every day and it is not known where they came from. In an ideal world every rare item would have a page such as this:

www.uoguide.com/Rift_Pillar

If anyone would like to help out you can always contact me, either by private message, ICQ, or posting in this thread.
 

Lord Nabin

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Great Job JC

Thanks for the effort on this.
 

JC the Builder

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Also, if anyone is interested in doing a whole design for UORares I would be open to it. I don't have the time redesign it myself so it will probably end up looking the way it does now.
 

Taylor

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Re: UORares: How many pages/posts? Is it currently using a CMS or is it just HTML?
 

BrianFreud

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Hey JC,

This sounds kind of familiar to the project I've been working on, which you'd talked with me about. As I told you in PM, I've been working on building this kind of data into a wiki-friendly format for here at Stratics, similar my rubble nifo site.

Re: Uorares.com, I'm kind of confused what that's going to become. Having that kind of data being worked on here at stratics, soon to be worked on at uoguide, then worked on at uorares.com, etc - it becomes too many different places all trying to put the same data together. Just my opinion, but I think it'd be far better to focus on one place working to build that data. The community's small enough as it is, there's just not enough people to easily handle the existing 4000+ EM items (plus seer, etc) as it is, let alone multiplying that work by separately trying to assemble it on multiple sites. So what's the benefit of bringing back uorares.com after all these years, vs that data being on Stratics (and UOGuide?)?

Also, I saw you're trying to get folks to help write pages over at uoguide. I've looked, but can't find anything. Do you have a written policy anywhere stating what rights are retained by contributors, and which are assumed by the site?

Brian
 

Assia Penryn

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Keep up the good work, JC. I use and recommend UOGuide all the time. Thank you for all your work with it.
 

Assia Penryn

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Now that I think about it, JC... if you want to send me an ICQ with a how to use the code link and more details, guidelines on what you do and don't want, I'll see if I can devote some time towards helping add some content. I've been having health issues lately so my time may be sporadic, but I'll try. Perhaps it will be a way to help as payback for all the times I have found your wiki useful.
 

JC the Builder

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Re: Uorares.com, I'm kind of confused what that's going to become. Having that kind of data being worked on here at stratics, soon to be worked on at uoguide, then worked on at uorares.com, etc - it becomes too many different places all trying to put the same data together.
UORares isn't going to be updated for the forseeable future. I simply want to make the site look nicer and have it keep the same old rare information it always had. It will be a sort of "museum" of an old UO website with links to more current information about rare items on other websites.

Also, I saw you're trying to get folks to help write pages over at uoguide. I've looked, but can't find anything. Do you have a written policy anywhere stating what rights are retained by contributors, and which are assumed by the site?
There isn't really a policy. If you write a big thing for UOGuide I'm not going to demand you only keep it on UOGuide. If you want to post it elsewhere it is fine.

Now that I think about it, JC... if you want to send me an ICQ with a how to use the code link and more details, guidelines on what you do and don't want, I'll see if I can devote some time towards helping add some content. I've been having health issues lately so my time may be sporadic, but I'll try. Perhaps it will be a way to help as payback for all the times I have found your wiki useful.
You can read all about how to edit at www.uoguide.com/Help:Contents
 

BrianFreud

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There isn't really a policy. If you write a big thing for UOGuide I'm not going to demand you only keep it on UOGuide. If you want to post it elsewhere it is fine.
Yes, but that's my point. If I or someone else writes something of any size, and puts it at UOGuide, that doesn't make it UOGuide's to demand anything about. The author still retains copyright/ownership. It came up over in Wikia plagiarizing UOGuide - UOGuide Forum as well.
I don't really follow internet licensing. I just follow the license that it isn't a nice thing to do to copy another website.
I have more than a little experience in these waters though, and no offense, as the person running a site like UOGuide, you *have* to have a licensing policy, and you have to make clear who retains what copyright when they post something on your site. The last time I was willing to simply assume good intentions and spend time donating information, CDDB turned into Gracenote.

In 2000, CDDB Inc. was renamed Gracenote. Early announcements asserted that access to the CDDB service would "remain 100% free to software developers and consumers." The license was nonetheless changed, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept. If one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database such as freedb. Any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup.

In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, since Gracenote wanted to force programmers to switch to CDDB2, a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with freedb.

The license change motivated many forks in the CDDB project tree, including the freedb project, which is intended to remain free software.

As of June 2, 2008, Sony Corp. of America completed acquisition (full ownership) of Gracenote, per the news note on the Gracenote website.
CDDB - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

JC the Builder

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I have more than a little experience in these waters though, and no offense, as the person running a site like UOGuide, you *have* to have a licensing policy, and you have to make clear who retains what copyright when they post something on your site.
The Meadiawiki software has a default license which UOGuide uses for content. There has never been a complaint about who owns content on UOGuide in 10 years now.

If you have concerns they can be discussed. As I said, I don't feel UOGuide has the exclusive right to things posted on the site. And if I get notice something was copied from somewhere else without permission it would be removed. That is how UOGuide operates.

If you are worried I am going to sell UOGuide to the highest bidder, well there is no way to promise you that. You will just have to go by my reputation of running UO websites for 15 years and donating to keep Stratics going. I believe actions speak stronger than some license document.
 

BrianFreud

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The Meadiawiki software has a default license which UOGuide uses for content. There has never been a complaint about who owns content on UOGuide in 10 years now.
I'm not talking about you selling or not. I'm talking about the license which is applied to the content users contribute. That default MediaWiki license is directly displayed on every page. UOGuide does not display that text, nor is it anywhere I could find on the site.



and



and




compared with



That licensing text is present when you first set up a mediawiki, I agree. But in the case of UOGuide, it has been removed, as you can see above. You have nothing anywhere on the site about the licensing for the content, either for reuse or to define the rights for contributors.

If you have concerns they can be discussed. As I said, I don't feel UOGuide has the exclusive right to things posted on the site. And if I get notice something was copied from somewhere else without permission it would be removed. That is how UOGuide operates.

If you are worried I am going to sell UOGuide to the highest bidder, well there is no way to promise you that. You will just have to go by my reputation of running UO websites for 15 years and donating to keep Stratics going. I believe actions speak stronger than some license document.
You have several recent posts here at Stratics trying to get people to come write for UOGuide. You have also asked me to contribute my rubble site in its entirety, along with other rares data. We've only just seen this very site have all its contents auctioned off to the highest bidder. I am asking what protections you are giving anyone who does contribute. You might not like picking a license, but you can't just not pick one. At the moment you have it set up such that any contributor is simply giving you content, and you're taking complete ownership. Hand waving about people not needing license protections, on the basis of simply trusting you is how we got to the mess of stratics being up for auction. I've been down that road before; it's always messy and never fun. ...and entirely preventable. (Either clear licensing is in place, or I simply choose not to waste my time contributing.)
 
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JC the Builder

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That default MediaWiki license is directly displayed on every page. UOGuide does not display that text, nor is it anywhere I could find on the site.
A note about the license can always be added back into the editing page. I intentionally deleted some huge blurb about copyright on the editing page, which likely also had information about licensing. My style is minimalist and I don't want to confuse potential new users who think they need to know all about copyright, licensing, formatting, etc. If someone wants to learn more that information is available elsewhere on UOGuide.

I am asking what protections you are giving anyone who does contribute. You might not like picking a license, but you can't just not pick one. At the moment you have it set up such that any contributor is simply giving you content, and you're taking complete ownership. Hand waving about people not needing license protections, on the basis of simply trusting you is how we got to the mess of stratics being up for auction. I've been down that road before; it's always messy and never fun. ...and entirely preventable. (Either clear licensing is in place, or I simply choose not to waste my time contributing.)
The great thing about UOGuide is anyone can contribute. If you want to sort out the licensing situation then you are welcome to do so. As I said, I don't recall this ever being brought up in the past.
 

BrianFreud

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I think perhaps too much was deleted then, because I cannot find anything anywhere on the wiki regarding which license it uses. And that "huge blurb" that's there by default... it's a single line of text in the footer.



Or on the edit page, where it again is a single line of text...



The UOGuide version of either isn't significantly smaller. It's simply had the license removed:



A note about the license can always be added back into the editing page. I intentionally deleted some huge blurb about copyright on the editing page, which likely also had information about licensing. My style is minimalist and I don't want to confuse potential new users who think they need to know all about copyright, licensing, formatting, etc.
The license info for a wiki should be in the footer, and that template is not publicly editable. Minimalism is all fine and good, but not at the expense of clearly stating who owns what, and with what rights, on a user-generated content site.

If someone wants to learn more that information is available elsewhere on UOGuide.
I've searched. Can you link to that page? Because the only page with anything about licensing that I can find is a old copy of UO's license.

The great thing about UOGuide is anyone can contribute. If you want to sort out the licensing situation then you are welcome to do so. As I said, I don't recall this ever being brought up in the past.
Deciding on the licensing for the site is not my place as a potential contributing editor. That is entirely up to you. Creative commons makes it easy: Choose a License

I will say, however, that UORubbles is under a CC-BY-SA license. At the moment, with UOGuide having no stated license at all, my site's licensing would not allow it to be used, in any significant part, at UOGuide.
 
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