Talk:Erinyes (Individual WarShip)

Bombardment of Taurus

Has anyone got a reference for the Erinyes being blamed for the bombing of Taurus, as mentioned in the article? BrokenMnemonic (talk) 01:02, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

Ask, and ye shall receive. Though I must say I was a bit surprised, as earlier sources suggested the asteroids were equipped with thrust drives and not fired from a mass driver. Well, I guess we can canonically say the Erinyes is blamed for Taurus although the veracity of that claim is questionable. Frabby (talk) 01:38, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

Thanks for the reference - Rev's always told me to cite a reference for any facts in an article, and given the tone of some of the conversations over on the CGL forum whenever Sarna's mentioned, I'm a little sensitive towards making sure that any detail we add here has a link straight back to a canon source. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 02:32, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

I can feel ya, BM (I always giggle when I call you 'BM'): I am a little sensitive too about that. I really do feel the majority of the group does a good job referencing canon; what creeps in is usually some IP editor's presumption as to what is correct, and it usually is a change to something that is referenced! Not to say IP editors by-and-large aren't doing a great job themselves. Plus, there's also the hive-mind regarding wikis in general that has to be overcome.

I do feel better, tho, when I travel around the internet and find a corner of the BT world I hadn't seen before, yet they link to a Sarna article to assist their posts. Can't say I see that done back to official information, which says a lot about the trust the general BT fandom has (and not just CGL fans) for Sarna.--Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:17, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

It doesn't help that I don't find the CGL forums to be a particularly friendly or welcoming set of forums, which possibly jaundices my view a little as it's one of only two BattleTech forums I read. I gather that the MWO forums are big fans of Sarna - I wonder if Sarna's popularity is down to the amount of information available here, compared to other sites? BrokenMnemonic (talk) 03:40, 22 April 2013 (PDT)

BM, you found the right words, when some guys from the BT forum have some problems with sarna, why they not come to sarna, talk to the contributors or make edits, when they think some must changed or have problems with the content? This is what Bad Syntax pointed out on his Engineer blog and other problems the forum had, and the result was, he was banned on the forum, but Syntax is a fox in sheep cloathes, i have some sympathics to him.--Doneve (talk) 10:14, 22 April 2013 (PDT)

Bad Syntax (or do you mean BrokenMnemonic?) was banned on the CGL forum? Seems like I missed that part.

Anyways, while I do understand your frustration, I can also see how people are frustrated when they need to look something up and find a bad (or worse, wrong) Sarna article, believe what they read here, and later learn that the Sarna info they relied on was incomplete, outdated or plain incorrect. If we want to be taken seriously as a resource, we need to cater to exactly those people who, for whatever reason, don't want to contribute but come here looking for accurate info.

Finally, keep in mind that CGL freelancers with a lot of knowledge (typically the ones pointing out errors on Sarna) might be legally obliged to stay clear of Sarna, at least under their known names. Sarna is not and does not want to be an official site, so you can't expect the "official" people contributing much. It might cause legal troubles for them (NDAs) and CGL (unseen). Frabby (talk) 10:46, 22 April 2013 (PDT)

Frabby, Bad Syntax was banned.--Doneve (talk) 11:45, 22 April 2013 (PDT)

But the other question is! At first. The BT forum members look to sarna and found a bad writen article (ok we have some grammers and typos), but our editors, linked almost to canon sources, and there is the problem, some was fixed by talk to the Ask the Writers etc. sections on the forum, but not yet posted to sarna. Now i kick the ball back, why are so many sources must become errated, or have so many typos, wrong Maps, details etc., i know the CGL writers do a hell of job, but i don't understand the process to bring up some canonical sources with so many datamine errors, when i want to publish a product i datamine and fix some errors before the product was published, this make sense, i think so.--Doneve (talk) 15:57, 22 April 2013 (PDT)

I am among the volunteer factchecker pool, and I can assure you, the products are reviewed by experts who find problems I'd never see. But there's always errors and inconsistencies that creep in without anyone noticing them. That's just the way it is. I think CGL is already doing a decent job on the errata front - a lot of those problems are solved, after all, even though they don't make a penny from all the efforts. When the previous forum was hacked we all lost around six months' worth of recent data that couldn't be recovered and that hit the errata team as bad as anyone else, if not worse.

It's a good thing for BattleTech that the Sarna community exists as a totally independent party and double-checks all this. I too wish sometimes that the CGL officials would be a little more helpful, but I can see how much they have on their plate already so I'm not angry when a question goes unanswered. In urgend cases I reckon there's always the possibility to corner Herb in a BattleChat. ;) Frabby (talk) 01:02, 23 April 2013 (PDT)

Glad to see Rev back. As a new observer who has vast experience handling people in public (teaching, moderating, beta testing, etc) I'm glad to say the social climate at CBT is changing. When I was new to the forums, I found CBT to often be hostile to new users (not really wanting to say "hostile towards me" though that was the case). After only a little bit I was fed up with it and cracked back at a few people nice and hard but measured to their own hostility level. It might not have been the very best choice, as I dug a deeper hole of unpopularity for myself, but in spite of that I stuck around because someone has to be cool to the new folks, who are often knowledgeable vets of the game who just happen to lurk because they too felt they could not talk without getting a three page negative litany from someone with 5k or more posts dropped on them in the middle of the night. But as I told a few of the mods recently, I can see the change already in only a year. Lots more new people, and also, the flock of moderators that they brought in were there for a reason. I don't know for sure, but I feel that they were there to change the climate too (I get that from comments made by Mr Ghostbear himself about a year ago that even he felt that CBT was an unpleasant place to read at). I've seen a few of the freelancers talk down about Sarna too, which is not cool, as it encourages the prevailing attitude, but there's not much one can do about that except ignore it.

Anyway, I thought this was a great article, but yeah, like a few others around here, if you rely on the information here too much, you will get burned by some of the know-it-alls who I shall not single out by name as they often have Battlemasters above their names. I do what I can with the Clan stuff, which is all I can do. I would write Star League stuff, but Cyc and Broken handle that better than I, and I like reading their articles. Also, I have learned to not speculate - unless something about the text actually calls for speculation (too many examples to site) but then I have to lay out all options and not just my opinion, as that's then an essay and not an article. As Frabby suggested, we could corner someone in Battlechat, or even pm people (I've had luck with a certain very knowledgeable person answering private questions, though not always). Whenever I get down about it, I log into my anonymously named account at MWO and feel the love :) of a community that is appreciative. Thus I put that little note on my page that though our articles are often good, and it's fun to read here, e real deal is the books themselves that inspire us to work as hard as we often do. Sorry to drop my own litany here, but at least it's not all negative I figure :) I try to always add to a conversation in some way, that's just how I am, and I think we all have that in common here at Sarna, we're the nurturers, not the bashers. That's a very good thing. --Rebs (talk) 05:33, 23 April 2013 (PDT)

The biggest thing that got me into editing here was seeing that there were things about BattleTech I was interested in that were missing, and that Sarna was a great way to get a summary of lots of information from different sources on a particular topic... so I decided that I'd start editing to fill in some of those gaps. It bugs me that the sourcebooks are scattered with literally thousands of little details about planets that aren't on here, for example - often, a unit article will say two units fought on a world, but that info never made it into the planet article. Great swathes of stuff is missing, and I wanted to help make Sarna better. I know I'm not the most prolific or dedicated editor here, but I take a considerable degree of professional pride in the articles I write here, and the fact that everything I add has references and citations. And I admit, it really bugs me when people say they gave up coming to Sarna years ago because all the information's wrong and all their edits to correct it were reverted. I can't understand not wanting to help make things better and instead spending energy being negative.

When I started on Sarna, everyone was supportive - and my editing rate picked up almost immediately. I hesitated for over a year about making an account over on the CGL forums because I found them to be so overwhelmingly negative - and some of the most prolific posters are also some of the most hostile. I nearly pointed out to one person who was complaining at great length that his posts were being unfairly deleted in comparison to other people's that it might perhaps be because the vast majority of his posts are long, negative, snide and arrogant rants that selectively ignore anything canonical that refutes his viewpoint while going to great lengths to try and make other people feel stupid. As it is, I've largely given up any attempt to contribute to the vast majority of the threads on the forum because the majority of my posts were ignored, and because I've seen so many threads end up being the same tired arguments being recycled ad nauseum between the same double handful of people. I hate to think what it must be like for people who are new to BattleTech who look to the forums to try and learn more about the game - if I was someone who didn't know much about the backstory and the universe of BattleTech, I'd have walked away from the forum. I'll take your word for it that the attitude is changing there, Rebs - other than posting questions to clarify inconsistencies in texts, I've lost interest in trying to become a part of the community. I'd rather use my spare time to add information here. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 08:25, 23 April 2013 (PDT)

And I do not, cannot, will not blame you one iota for that, Broken. I have questioned why I bother over there at least a couple times a week since I started. It all goes back to someone needs to be cool to the new users, even if I felt at times like I was the only one doing it (now I feel I'm not alone, when it was just the double handfuls of folks as you said, it was easy for me to see why the community was stagnating for so long. I felt I could change that, how arrogant/foolhardy is that?!? :). I'm acutely aware of a lot of CBT folks opinion about me, I read people well on the net, and I smile sometimes when I answer back in a way that they aren't expecting or used to. Certain users (I think we both know that same ones that we're talking about) seem to think that CBT is their personal community (read: fife), ignoring that it's a public domain as far as users are concerned. I'm waiting to tell one of them specifically to never again quote one sentence of what I say just so that they can twist it up with their vision of this rather subjective game universe, and in the future quote my entire post or not at all, but that one's taken to avoiding where I post. So be it. I really don't want to be that way, but enough is enough. And as far as articles being reverted, I just don't see it and am certain it's just a glib response in order to excuse one's self from not contributing to the effort here while remaining negatively critical. Like you, I saw that the Clans needed someone with passion for them to bring them to life. I might overdo it sometimes, but I can't help it, the first BT novels I read were the Way of the Clans and the rest of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy, and I was hooked on their strange warrior culture. That passion makes me want to keep trying. And so what if the "gang of thousands of posts" don't like me? If I get new folks to stay, I create opportunities to make new friends as long as they stay and aren't run off by someone else (as happens). Also, TPTB do read there to gauge opinion, and I really hate the thought that the opinion that they get is so often a negative snark-fest. If that's so, then my voice must also be heard to temper that.

Anyway, glad I got to openly discuss this. Also, to the Sarna Community, sorry if long ago I came here to this site and felt that knowing ten or so sourcebooks and a stack of novels was all there is to knowing BT. That was an incredibly foolish notion that has since been corrected on my part. --Rebs (talk) 09:01, 23 April 2013 (PDT)