DIGITAL_DEVIL_DATABASE Community Forum

FYI: The Database Needs Contributors…
If you thought we have a writing staff, think again!!

Ever since the website was resurrected (after a nearly fatal fumble left it without a soul to tend to it’s needs) there has been a gulf where it was hoped wayward writers would find their way. We have waited and baited to no avail. So in one last ditch effort we’d like to make it plainly clear, we have no writing staff (in case anyone had presumed there was one.) In fact the website is user generated. Anyone and everyone are welcome, and encouraged, to make a scene in our forums, and we’re pledged to scramble to see that your contributions find a way onto the website. And anyway, this is how the website works now in case someone didn’t get the notice!

Oh, and on a not-unrelated note. The website will need to raise at least 100$ per year by way of the ads (per click) or there is no guarantee it will survive from year to year. So far we have almost 60$ in our coffers, but the current trend is not projecting in our favor. Observing our advertisements is a very easy way to support the site that anyone can do. Please consider doing so. Many people have worked hard to make this website possible, and now so can you! There are no more barriers (or excuses) just possibilities.

We have to find an English editor fast or else!!
Translators also welcome…

Without an English editor we can no longer continue to add timely content to the website or news blog in English. We always love to see new contributors, but we must find someone able to read and write English with enough ability to produce a passing paper for a college level course. An editor does not need to write new content for the database, but is needed to correct new content of varying quality prior to publishing. We need righteous people to help us get the job done! Please consider lending your talents to our effort…

On a less dreadful note, we’re nearing completion of our translation facilities. And would very much like to welcome anyone who can read and write two languages, and preferably one with native fluency, to help us translate our website’s interface and many articles. Please don’t hesitate to offer your support. This is a collaborative effort, so it is great to have as many people as possible working together to provide support for a new language. It is ok for the website to be partially translated. Our aim is to provide readers with the best information without inconvenience. Just pledge to help and we will add support for your favorite language and make you its first translator!

Our policy is to compensate our contributors, past and present, for all time. Contributors receive an agreed upon portion of our advertising revenue, renegotiated each quarter.

Am interested in the English editor job guys. I'm a Mass Communication (hons) graduate and
have done website content editing before. Also am a major fan of the SMT series and am quite
well versed in the occult/mythology. Email me so we can arrange something.
Thanks!

Thanks for your offer yourself in these time of needs, benedict_x  :biggrin: yksehtniycul will contact you as soon as possible.

I'd like to throw my hat into the ring along with benedict_x for the English editor job. I'm an English teacher and a big fan of the genre, although I haven't done any website editing before.
Anyways, if you're interested let me know ianevans29@yahoo.com

Ok, this sounds good! :rainbow:

We've been very lucky this time, because we seem to have another new member named Fishtank (http://www.digitaldevildb.com/bbs/index.php?action=profile;u=1065) who has also privately offered her services. There is more than enough work to be done for two... and it will help if one editor or another is not available when a news item or whatever needs to be published :smokin:

Fishtank is also comfortable with Spanish I think, so maybe we can start putting more new content up on the site if since Emilio is more comfortable working in Spanish. With so much help we can probably adapt anything he can come up with for our core English readers (I will post the worldwide statistics sometime) ...it would be nice to try to get something on all the empty pages we have, so our readership could get a more comprehensive perspective of Megaten.

I will try to get everything in order asap. Accounts and permissions and all. Doing the actual work is not much more complicated than posting in forums. Sometime later tonight I will be free to set everything up.

Thanks everyone. Hopefully the mood will really buck up around here soon :cool:

Oh wow! I also just noticed we have three would be editors up to bat :sweatdrop:

This should increase the odds of one of you hanging around for good :tongue:


Please everyone register with the same name as you registered in the forums here:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/wp-login.php?action=register

I can do this for you if I must, but it's better you do it^


Though I will probably go ahead and register anyone absent before setting everything up later tonight :rolleyes:

Right now I need to update the front page, and get outside~

I've granted Fishtank's and Wofzau's WordPress account Editor status. I'll do the same for Benedict's as soon as his WordPress account is ready (let me know if you're having any trouble)

As an Editor, you can edit any Contributor's posts before their status is made to be Published (ie. they're Published)

If one of our Editors stands out above the rest, I'll probably give one Editor the ability to publish posts... so I won't have to be bothered with that responsibility.


Our Editors have a far more limited reach than traditional WordPress Editors. This is probably a good thing, because I can assign Editors without risking any actual damage to the website. So don't worry about messing anything up, because you can't :tongue:


Our Editors can't make pages, but most of our pages actually fetch their content from hidden posts. These posts are filed in the Pagetree category (part of a hack I cooked up -- this website is pretty much just WordPress on hack steroids)


Currently these page/posts are set to Private status, but I'm going to have to figure out an alternative to this sooner or later. The page content will be fetched regardless the status of the post however for now. So special care will have to be taken when working on pages.


I'm going to ask that you never use the Visual Editor option in your WordPress profile. In generally ask that Contributors not use this, and I'm tempted to hack it out of our system altogether. But as Editors you've a special responsibility not to fuck up others' posts - which the Visual Editor has been known to do (I've disable that option in your profile's btw) ...Therefore you need to be familiar with a minimal set of HTML concepts. Basically all you really need to know, is just like when posting in forums were you've probably made use of BBCODE (eg. [b]bold[/b]) you can do the same with HTML, only instead of square brackets, use angled ones (eg. <b>bold</b>) ...this seems simple enough but people tend to have serious trouble/anxiety when it comes to html. Other than all the stuff you've probably used with BBCODE, the only other thing I ask is you put paragraph tags, <p></p> , around paragraphs. This isn't technically necessary for WordPress (because it will automatically insert them if absent) but it's a good habit, because sometimes hacks I use might work around normal WP procedures, and on the Pages I like to have tighter control over presentation (which you loose when you let WP go auto formatting your stuff)

edited: Also use <br /> tags to force a newline (ie. before you press enter after a line of text)

If you want to have credits given to you as an editor on any post/page you can make a Custom Field (via the WP interface) called "editors", and put your user number, followed by a space, then your display name (your user number is in the address bar when you're on your WordPress profile page) ...the number is important, the following name is just for fallback and notation. Btw, I haven't implemented this feature yet but I will no problem. Oh and if some editor has already put their name their, just hit enter to make a newline after theirs, and type in your own number / name on that line.


For posts (that go in the news blog) all of the different languages are in the same post. Stuff in English goes between [lang_en] and [/lang_en] tags. And Spanish [lang_es] and [/lang_es], and so on. For pages, each page has it's on post. The Spanish version of a page goes in the Pagetree/es subcategory. We also translate little phrases around the site and page titles from this page I setup:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/maintenance/locales/es/ (might look funny on older browser -- haven't taken pains with it yet, considering it's not an official part of the website)

I gave Fishtank Spanish translation privileges, which basically will just let her edit that page, but Emilio pretty much has that page under control for now.


Many of our pages written by Tony (the original site founder) have very editorial type language in them. If any of our new editors would like to edit his stuff to tone that down, that would be awesome.


In the meantime, though technically I've already published this post... I still haven't put up an English version of it, because I haven't had time to edit Emilio's own translation into English:


So if one of you just want to post an edit job of that into the forums, I can publish it (recall our Editors can't technically edit published posts)

Also go ahead and post that you're going to edit it, so we don't end up with two edited versions ok :wink:

WordPress btw will tell you if someone else is currently working on a post. So best to do your editing work online.


Ok! You have your marching orders, now hop to it!! Just kidding, but them's the ropes :smokin:

Ok, wasn't sure where in the forums to put this so I thought I'd do it here. Not really sure what you meant by tone it down so I've done it twice. The first is a lot more formal while the second I tried to loosen it up a bit. Whichever version you prefer let me know and I'll use it as a basis in the future.

Thanks, I will definitely use one of these :smug:

I think we want the website materials to be in a non-editorial stance. We want our contributors personalities to shine through, but we don't want value-judgment statements such as, "boy this game is a real stinker." You know, basic journalism ethics.

So as an editor it's your job to stay as close to the writer's intention and attitude, but to catch any language that is grammatically not up to par with traditional/establishment English and obviously not phrased in some colloquial fashion.

In Emilio's case, as long as he is happy, we are happy. English is not his first language, and he doesn't profess any definite affinity to one style or another I think. Generally his translations are pretty flat. So feel free to ad some levity. I tried to guss up his last several posts, but with very little time or patience I'm afraid. So you can even come up with better versions of those if you please.

Generally we file any editing / translations under the same forum thread you'll get to by clicking on the "Forum Discussion" link underneath each front page post.


I think this site leans to an overly informative format, but we try to keep the news items as short and sweet as possible. We'd like to be the final authority on everything Megaten... or at least that seems to be the tone/mission of the website we've inherited. So as an editor, if you want to coach a contributor to add more information, that is no problem. However, I think we want to keep a pseudo professional line between the author and the editor... so I'm hesitant to ever imply that editors should ad anything too informational/authoritative outside the stuff of standard practices. Unless an author seems withdrawn to work with the editors, then maybe you should step in to get the job done. Personally I try to cover all the bases, but generally everything is pretty lax around here. So if I seem really starched about this stuff, it's just an act :smokin:

Good work btw :wink:



PS: We're not really sure I think about how to address the website in print. But I think formally the policy is now to use digitaldevildb.com in writing (or just The Database, or even less specific addresses) ...then in graphics DDDB, and in some cases where appropriate just D3. Like in an interview for speaker initials, or some cases to save space without drawing attention. D3 is more often used informally, like in the forums to emulate speaking.

Also guys! PSX is officially no longer permitted to be used by Sony :rolleyes:

The original Playstation is now PS1. PSX is a DVR/PS2 home entertainment console released in Japan :ninja:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSX_(DVR)

Thanks for clearing that up for me, it'll be a great help in the future

Well, since there really isn't anything in particular for all of our new found editors to tackle right now :rolleyes:

I setup a post (which will someday become a page) here:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/?p=3810&preview=true

As an example of some of the objectivity problems we have with some of the old content. The old side ("archives") I guess was sort of Tony's sandbox. He wrote virtually all of it himself, and a lot of the material was/is very editorial in nature. Since Tony more or less dumped the site on the community, it's new concept is to be an open source site where the entire community can pool its resources. We don't believe any one person is capable of faithfully documenting all of Megatendom obviously. And for this reason we don't want editorial content as much as possible. There probably isn't even room for an editorial wing of the website in the future (though anyone can post comments)

Anyway, this article is just too editorial to publish as is. So if any of you guys would like to claim it and clean it up, that would be cool. You can also easily (ask if you need help) create such a post for any page in the archive yourself, and I will see that it is added to the new website proper.


I also gotta add, that this anime happens to be my favorite piece of Megaten merchandise ever produced. As an artist it also happens to be in my top five anime of all time list, and I think it's technically superb and a classic. I don't really have anything bad to say about it. I'm also probably the first member of the internet community to point out this anime existed (and no one really believed me for so long -- mine was just a guess because stills from it are in the Famicom Megami Tensei "1" instruction manual)

Anyway, you can see how opinions can so differ. I don't want a glowing review of it, but positive comments are much less offensive/benign than negative ones. This is also no place for panning snooty critic type journalism either.

It's definitely worth criticizing the commercial subtitler for using Roki instead of Loki, but otherwise... if you're gonna speak harshly or warmly, don't do it about stuff that is obviously subjective. In cases were products have been reviewed broadly by the industry, we can always cite reviews in the 3rd person, but we're not in the business of reviews here.

Hey, checkout the cool Speedy graphic I'd added to this post (eg. on the front page) a few days ago :biggrin:

I just realized no one else was seeing me except me because I'd forgotten to transfer over some necessary stylesheet changes (to the public stylesheet)

(http://www.digitaldevildb.com/speedy.png)

Dunno if he makes the post illegible, but I thought it would take up less space to slide him underneath the text~


edited/ps: That reminds me... are we ever going to implement that tagging graphic system (ie. sticking little sticker-like avatars in the corner of posts?)

Urp, sorry for the long silence on my part; college's been let out and I just now got back home (where there is Internet!). Guess I need to catch up a bit, but I'm sure that won't be a problem for me. Just hope I didn't let you down any by the sudden lack of communication- I didn't expect to not have a connection for this long.

Poor poor no-internet-university :smug:

 :biggrin: Glad to have you! Don't give up~

Urgh. My head hurts.  :doh:

Dunno if I made it better or butchered completely. I left out one paragraph as it consisted mainly of bashing the storyline, anyways its in the pending review section. Sorry if it's of no use, feel free to get one of the other two to do it again. I think I'll leave out the next edit for someone else as I'd like to see if I could learn anything off of them.

At first glance it seems like you did more of a re-write here than an edit job. Which is not a problem in this case... but might be if a new writer had produced the original. Anyway, we can probably just give you writing credit for this and cite Tony's article in the archives as the main source.

Would just need to rewrite stuff like, "Several months ago I stumbled upon an eBay auction for Megami Tensei animation cels from this film. For a low price, I was sent a handful of original, painted cels and some pencil drawings. They have been scanned in and included below." So that it's clear that it's not worded on behalf of the author. You could either put Tony's words in a blockquote (or I can as the admin if you prefer) or, you could just write it in the 3rd person citing Tony for the cels.... or you could just thank Tony for the original writeup and cells and provide a link to his more critical review in the archives, all in the same final paragraph. Whatever is up to you.

I don't have to keep telling you how much we appreciate the help/support of course. I'll try to get everyone setup karma wise asap. If you start doing a lot consider setting up a thread for yourself in the Sea of Souls board ok :rainbow:

Also, I don't think it's made clear enough that the big quote in the article is from the back of the English retail release cassette box. Granted it wasn't very clear in Tony's writeup, but your version makes it even less clear by omitting "official". Try to make it plain in the introduction to the quote it is from the back of the box ok :smokin:

Yeah, sorry bout that  :sweatdrop:

Anyways, have made clear that the description is official and have reworded the final paragraph to thank Tony for the cels and have linked his original review

Ironic thing is that I actually bumped into the Shinsen Subs version a couple of weeks ago while waiting for the next 00 to be released. Have to admit that it was a lot better than many other 80's anime I've seen although I'm still a little confused by the whole squishing people to death thing. It was probably due to a limited budget but still..... :confused:

What's wrong with squishing people to death??

Anyway, congrats, you're published...

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/anime/digital-devil-story-megami-tensei-anime-ova/

I edited the last paragraph on the end a little for functionality. And I changed this bit:

"Of personal interest is the art style itself, which is quite obviously based off of the artwork that went along with the original video game release of Megami Tensei."

Because I have a feeling the anime came first (regardless of publishing dates) ...but I left it ambiguous because I'm not in a fact checking frame of mind atm. If anyone knows for sure, hopefully they will just comment on the page.

I didn't give it a thorough looking over, but I trust that it's ok. I gotta trust editors at some point I guess if I ever wanna be completely free of the business myself.


PS: I gotta admit I have a warm spot in my heart for classic anime (up to the late 80s with some odd exceptions) ...the more recent stuff though I find nearly infuriatingly disturbing, and I can't tell you precisely why, but the artist in me probably suspects the glut of it is of vastly inferior quality -- though I'm sure most of the human population would argue otherwise... and to no end (what with all our modern know-how and production values~)

Wow! Checkout this comment:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/archives/digital-devil-database/2009/03/we-have-to-find-an-english-editor-fast-or-else-translators-also-welcome/#comment-2391

That would be awesome if we can get help with Portuguese and German. Also Sergio is Spanish. I'd love to see the several Spanish people interested in helping the site work out a system amongst themselves for generating new content. It's no prob if everything happens in Spanish first. If English speakers don't like it, they'll just have to pledge to help right! :tongue:

Hi, guys I'm a big fan of everything related SMT, my name is Luca, I'm italian and I'm a translator (I mean it's my job;)) if you need help for an italian version of the website contact me as I would be very glad to help, thank you, see you soon:)

Are you freaking kidding :rolleyes:

How soon can you start?! :biggrin:


PS: Say the word Luca, and Italian will be ready to go :smokin:

whenever you want!^_^

contact me via MSN at viewtiful_mee@yahoo.it
or send me an email (the address should be on my profile),  as i said, i'd be very glad to help^_^

Sure, I'll setup Italian right now.

I did send you an email on behalf of the website, but if you'll forgive me, I really don't understand why people always want to be contacted by email?? Maybe you could explain? We use the forums for pretty much everything. There is a pseudo-private forum as an alternative for our users that use PMs heavily (for website improvement purposes) ...we'll let you in if you ever need it / fill up your karma. It's really too complicated for me or anyone to stay in touch with so many people by email :sweatdrop:

I try to make transparency a value around here :smokin:

Italian translation info......

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/bbs/index.php/topic,963.new.html


And Chinese in case anyone missed it....

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/bbs/index.php/topic,962.msg10216.html

well, for me is just easier to check your messages while i check other emails.....anyway, the forum will be okay:)

You should be able to have the PM ("My Messages") system send alerts to your email. You can also "watch" certain threads so that you'll get emails when the thread is active.

Okay, did some minor work on the Chinese page today. As I've mentioned before my stuff is pretty basic but I'm gonna see if I can get a co-worker to go over it for me in the future, so fingers crossed   :biggrin:

Hi everyone!!
I send a PM to the admin but i post here too.
I love the Persona Series, and also the SMT Series, so i offer my help.
I am French, and i can cover event for The French Community or anything else.
See Ya

French will be awesome! I will set you (and French) up asap. I'm always eager to get a new language started~

PS: I've sent you a PM reply. If you haven't already, please register here as Dantess (http://www.digitaldevildb.com/wp-login.php?action=register)

Please let me know if I left anyone out :smokin:

French is officially setup. Please let us know as soon as you've registered with the database (front page)

It's been eerily quiet for the last week or two :ninja:

So I gotta ask... how many of you all are still with us!? :CecilD_crouch:

I'm still in, but it has been a pain lately, I have a lot of thing to do and I began working on my manga again which is not leaving me any free time, I haven't published a new chapter in the past two months :sick:

Well I always thought we could count on you... in face "we" includes you :rolleyes:

I'll never understand why so many netizens flock to help out like flies on shit... then promptly disappear before they even finish introducing themselves :doh:

Sometimes it seems like a coordinated effort to make the website seem cursed :tongue:

I am sorry to bother you, but i dont understand how i add the translation i've made.

This is what we're here for :rainbow:

But what kind of translation have you made? There or ostensibly three kinds. A news item, a page, and the website elements itself.

We've answered all of these questions several times all over the forum, but tell us which you are trying to translate, and we will help you asap.

I understand we probably need a translation faq, but in the meantime I will try to hunt down a useful post elsewere~


PS: The simplest kind is to login (from the front page) go here(http://www.digitaldevildb.com/maintenance/locales/fr/) and translate as many as you like, then hit "compile revision", then hit "commit revision". If that page looks really weird btw, you probably need a newer web browser (FF3, Google Chrome, and Safari work very nicely)

Ah! There is already an explanation in the French thread :tongue:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/bbs/index.php/topic,968.0.html

If you need more help, please ask a specific question :rainbow:

Please please don't give up :wink:



PS: Once you figure everything out. It would be very helpful to translate these instructions into French :smokin:

Kind of late, but I'm willing to help with English editing if I can.

We're always open to any help! In fact the entire website is now user generated, so if it isn't obvious, anyone who wants to can take initiative and steer the site anywhere they'd like to take it... right now if they want to even :rainbow:

We really got to the point we had to beg for editors though. It seems like we have a ton of editors, and no new content coming in atm (though I'm guessing if any basic news hits it will be put up) ...but truth be told, nearly everyone that ever offers to help generally disappears without a trace before they're finished introducing themselves. So by all means, please please please make yourself at home :smokin:

We've probably had more than 30 offers to help since the website came back, but as you can see, the only reliable fixtures around here at this point are me and Emilio.

Still here

Sorry I've been a bit quiet, as I said my Chinese translating ain't gonna be super speedy unfortunately, HOWEVER....I have finally finished translating all the page names and all those bells and whistles and one article. Gonna try putting the article up now but I may need help. If so I'll check back :smokin:


EDIT: Okay, either I'm going crazy or in the locales there isn't a translation Keyword for "Special Features".

Hey, anything is awesome. It just gets weird when things are too quiet... :ninja:

Please don't feel pressured to deliver results, but it's good to hear from everyone now and then. Especially contributors at first, because there is a sort of stigma/history of flaky volunteers around here :frown:

Are you still with us Dantess??


edited: You seem to be lurking... please let us know if you still need help getting your translations up. I checked everything earlier, just to make sure everything was working.

Yes i'm still here but it may be explain but i still dont understand...
I'm pretty good with computer and internet but your forum surpass me, it is too strong for me...
So i dont know how to do and i think i will send you the translation or anything else.
Or if someone have messenger he can explain how to do it.
See ya

If you want I can explain you whatever you need via messenger. I'm always connected, so it would be a pleasure to me if I'm not busy with something else. :wink: Just let me know what you don't understand and I'll try my best to explain to you.

You'll find my MSN address in my profile, so feel free to add me. :wink:

1) Can you tell us with a link what it is you are attempting to translate?

2) Can you tell us what kind of internet browser you are using, and the version number.?

3) Are you logged into the website? (not the same as the forums.)

About 3) ...if you got to http://www.digitialdevildb.com/fr/ you will see "Connexion" along the side of the page (if you are not already logged in) ...that is where you can always login. For some pages without the side menu it is at the top of the page.

Ok!

If you login, then goto: http://www.digitaldevildb.com/wp-admin/?lang_pref=fr

From now on your administration pages should be in French (same goes for other languages)

This will no longer effect the rest of the website (I hope) so it is safe for everyone to do from now on. In the future I will try to make this a profile option, but I have bigger fish to fry for now~

This post has had an addendum and headline change...

Some translations might stretch the effort a little further, but who can say for certain :ninja:

Oh Dantess!! I just found that translation you were having trouble with :eek:

I hope you're still around :sweatdrop:

I did not notice it because it was on the second page of the Drafts posts :doh:

You actually did a good job, but you did a Page style translation (which is actually tougher than a News style translation)

I will get it up before I go to sleep, promise :goodnight:


PS: There are two drafts, so let me know if I chose the better one :sweatdrop:

I will have a French flag up by tomorrow.

Still with us cj iwakura? I saw your account in the Atlus USA forums (who knew they had an IMAGINE board) and remembered... anyway, we need all the help we can get.

We need you to register as "cj iwakura" from the front page (http://www.digitaldevildb.com/) first however. Then I can make you an editor (we also desperately need contributors -- more so than editors, but that is another story, and another level of commitment for that matter)

edited: Woops, didn't mean to post the forum banner graphic url :doh:

Yep, just been busy. After a week or so, I should be free to help out. Sorry for not keeping better tabs on this place, I'll try to fix that in the future.