Ephemeral, The XF Fanfic AutoArchive http://ephemeralfic.org Frequently Asked Questions last updated 5/26/1999 by Scott Miller Contents 1. What is Ephemeral? 2. What isn't Ephemeral? 3. Do I need any particular web browser to use Ephemeral? 4. How do I use Ephemeral? A. Browsing B. Searching 5. What are Recommendations? Hits? 6. How do I make sure Ephemeral gets my stories? 7. How do I tell Ephemeral not to archive my stories? 8. What other cool things can I tell Ephemeral to do in my stories? 9. How long do stories stay on Ephemeral? 10. How does it all work? 11. This is all very wonderful, are there any guarantees? 12. So why isn't story XX on Ephemeral? 13. Why isn't alt.tv.x-files.creative.mature archived? 14. Can I submit my stories to Ephemeral? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. What is Ephemeral? Ephemeral isn't just a website, its a collection of home grown, and open source software that monitors ATXC, and archives stories marked with NEW: and REPOST: tags. Its general reason for existence is to fill the gap of silence on the web between updates on the Gossamer archives. Because of this, Ephemeral is cleared with each update of Gossamer, so it isn't truely an archive, more like a temporary repository for material posted on ATXC. 2. What isn't Ephemeral? Ephemeral isn't a general archive. It is, and always will be a halfway house for stories not yet archived on Gossamer. For this reason, *DO NOT* expect Ephemeral to be maintained with any sense of aesthetics. Don't write to complain that not all of your stories are here, or that that multipart stories aren't all nice and tidily next to each other. About the only change I will allow is incorrect author fields (because authors deserve to receive credit for good work). 3. Do I need any particular web browser to use Ephemeral? Not really, any browser with tables support would be ideal (Netscape 2+, any version of IE), but this isn't even required. If you have Lynx or a similar textmode browser, Ephemeral will detect this and remove tables. If you're using a text browser and the screen looks disorderly, try adding "?textmode=1" to the end of the URL. 4. How do I use Ephemeral? First, point your browser to: http://obsidian.teter.indiana.edu/ephemeral.html When you arrive, you'll see the last ten stories Ephemeral grabbed from ATXC. You can click on the titles to read the stories. To go to the next ten stories, click the more link at the bottom of the page. A. Browsing Ephemeral has two control panels at the bottom of each page. One, the Browse controls, allows you to tell Ephemeral how to display the stories. You can have the database sort by Title, Author, E-mail, Date, Length of the story, Hits, and Recommendations. And each of these fields can be Ascending or Descending. Just select from each box which setting you want. There are two input fields as well. The first lets you specify the number of stories to display per page before a More is needed. The second lets you skip a number of stories. For example, to have 15 stories per page, starting with the thirtieth story, you'd enter "15" for Max per page, and "29" for the start point (eg skip 29 stories) When you have the settings the way you want them, click Browse. B. Searching Ephemeral also provides some searching capability to locate stories archived here. You can select from the Title, Author, or Text fields, and input one or more words to search on. Some things to note, though: * Searches for a part of a word won't work. For example, searching for "Windc" when you want "Windchimes" won't return any results. * Searches for more than one word will only return stories that contain *all* of the specified words. * Text searches are quite slow and usually not incredibly effective, nevertheless, they are provided, but only work on the first 240 words of any story. C. Reading The most enjoyable of activities on Ephemeral is of course reading the stories there. Stories come up as text, with a control bar at the very bottom of the story. The control bar lets you skip to the next or previous story. You can also recommend the story and post feedback to the author here. Its just a click away, so if you liked the story, you really have no excuse not to respond. :) 5. What are Recommendations? Hits? When a story is grabbed by Ephemeral, the Recommendations and Hits are initially zero. Every time someone reads a story, the Hits field is increased by one. So you can sort by how many people have read each story if you like. Recommendations, however, are more subjective. If you like a story, you are highly encouraged to click the "Recommend" link at the end of the story or by its title in the story list. This increases the recommendations field by one. Then you can sort by Recommendations to find highly recommended stories. 6. How do I make sure Ephemeral gets my stories? Ephemeral is fully automated, so a story's title must match one of the tests Ephemeral's NNTP engine performs when scanning ATXC. To make sure your story passes these tests, make sure the title starts with one of the following (note that all are case-insensitive, so lower and upper case does not matter): NEW: NEW *NEW* NEW! REP REP: REV REV: REPOST REVISED ..or a story must have "(n/n)" in the title, like (1/1), (2/?), etc. Not just "1/1", though. If a subject contains one of the above tags at the beginning, or a "(n/n)", and no "re:" at the beginning, Ephemeral moves to archive the story. I personally prefer NEW: for new stories, and REP: for reposts. 7. How do I tell Ephemeral NOT to archive my story? If you are REALLY concerned about not having your story on the web (keep in mind Ephemeral doesn't archive forever, just until Gossamer updates), and you wish to use NEW: (please do, it makes everyone's life easier), make sure you place "*NO ARCHIVE*" within the first twenty lines of text. Ephemeral will ignore such stories. 8. What other cool things can I tell Ephemeral to do in my stories? Ephemeral has some other lesser used tags if you wish to take advantage of them. *FEEDBACK*somebody@somewhere.com This will force Ephemeral to use somebody@somewhere.com as the feedback address instead of the one Ephemeral guessed from the From: line *AUTHOR*'John Doe' This will force Ephemeral to set the author name to John Doe. Note that you DO need the single quotes here If you plan to use this, I think a good way to put these tags in your story would be: Ephemeral: *NO ARCHIVE* or perhaps Ephemeral: *FEEDBACK*scgmille@indiana.edu *AUTHOR*'Scott Miller' This is especially handy when somebody posts for you. 9. How long do stories stay on Ephemeral? Generally until the next Gossamer update. However, what really happens is I find the newest story on the new Gossamer update, and delete all stories with a date equal or older to that one. 10. How does it all work? You had to ask, didn't you. Ephemeral is three components. The first, and least interesting, is the Web interface. Its written in PHP3 (http://www.php3.org) to generate the page by accessing a MySQL relational database (http://www.mysql.org). The real interesting part is the back end: The Ephemeral NNTP engine. Written as a plugin for Gamora (http://gamora.org) in Java, the NNTP engine checks for new posts once every hour, and does a lot of text parsing to see if the post is a story. If it is, it grabs the text, checks for Ephemeral tags, then connects to the MySQL database and adds the record. Then it sleeps for an hour... and so on. 11. This is all very wonderful, are there any guarantees? NO! Ephemeral may not be up, it may archive stories that aren't really stories, it may miss stories, and it may fry your browser. That said, I'm trying to make it as useful as possible, but understand this is a hobby. 12. So why isn't story XX on Ephemeral? There could be several reasons, in order of likelyhood: 1. The story predates the existance of Ephemeral, or was older than the newest story on the last Gossamer update 2. The story did not use a NEW or REPOST tag of some sort when it was posted. 3. The story used an explicit *NO ARCHIVE* so Ephemeral ignored it. 4. The story wasn't posted on ATXC at all. 5. Ephemeral's news feed missed it for some reason. 6. Some cosmic ray upset the balance of the universe at the instant the story and Ephemeral came into contact. 13. Why isn't alt.tv.x-files.creative.mature archived? Various reasons, but I'm going to cop out and say "because its not alt.tv.x-files.creative" (also known as the "see-the-charter" defense) 14. Can I submit my stories to Ephemeral? As of yet, no. I have had quite a few request for this, and am working on an automation system for this, but I would like to comment that Ephemeral is an intermediate archive for not yet archived to Gossamer stories, so perhaps you should be submitting your stories there?