VSBW Profile Standards (Staff Only)

[Sera_EX]

@Andy

That's a misunderstanding. Copyright was brought up to distinguish an original character from an official character. As I told Agnaa, everything is technically copyrighted semantically speaking. However, those with a registered trademark of some sort, which encompasses over 90% of this site, are different than say, a mere Flash from Newgrounds. Copyright isn't exactly used to say "this doesn't belong here". That was never my intention but all the guys on Discord kept straw-maning me as if it was, without letting me finish.

 

[BigSmoke4269]

Uhh, sorry for intruding on your "staff only" discussion, but what is the "suggsverse"?

 

[GojiBoyForever]

Please don't post questions that can be answered by a quick google search on a Staff Only Thread.

 

[Antvasima]

It is a very badly written and extremely obscure self-insert story created mainly for the purpose of being the strongest verse ever in battleboard terms. Even the weakest characters are likely tier 0 by our standards, as the author keeps spamming any terms that he finds in these communities and the most powerful other fictions as a whole as the shit tiers, and then makes up his own nonsense words for the higher ones.

However, somewhere along the way he apparently started believing in what he wrote, self-inserted himself as married to the most powerful character, thinks that he has children with her, and believes that he is the supreme overgod of absolutely everything, as he has made statements that he wrote and owns all of fiction and reality, and that the absence of God is just the absence of him, so what was originally intended as an act of trolling apparently took over his life and ended up as several years of work combined with a massive megalomaniacal delusional god-complex.

Regardless, the point is that even if we included this poorly written self-indulgent and extremely obscure nonsense, we would end up with several dozens or possibly hundreds of characters from the verse in our tier 0, which would mean that I would have spent almost 20000 hours organising the growth of this community just so it would ultimately mainly end up as a massive marketing device for the extremely unsympathetic delusions of an apparent madman.

My apologies for going on a rant here, but the Suggsverse as a concept definitely rubs me the wrong way, and I thought that an explanation might be necessary. We should stop discussing this issue though, and feel free to remove this post if it is too controversial or derailing.

 

[Agnaa]

Dargoo, we need to address this anyway because even someone as reasonable as Agnaa believes we should allow that here. It's gotten that bad. Apparently breaking the tiering system isn't a good reason. People who only read the wikia seem to believe that it doesn't and that it can actually be tiered.

Okay so I think this statement has come from a slight misunderstanding, where I wasn't clear on the difference between my insanely extreme opinions that I don't want vsbw following but would follow if I had my own wiki, and my responses to arguments to show their flaws, and my opinions on what should be done on the wiki.

By what I'd do on my own wiki, I'd be fine with having fanfiction and OC profiles, but I know that FC/OC is another site for a reason, so I don't want vsbw to go in this direction.

By my responses to arguments, I think just looking at the content of the verse and not the broader context it was written in could easily let in a slightly better Suggsverse with just as many tier 0s and that not doing so is a logical contradiction. But that looking at copyright instead of notability still deletes many worthwhile verses while not really getting around this issue (what if I paid a few thousand dollars to trademark Suggsverse?)

By what I think should be done on the wiki, I think we should continue looking at verses based on criteria of notability as I've outlined above. This criteria excludes Suggsverse.

 

[DnW0]

My statement hasn't really been properly addressed so I'm going to re-mention it:

What problem does banning all non-trademark verses have other than "hurting people's feelings" and "takes long to implement"?

If there are no problems then why not resort to it? If people are so concerned about their profiles then move it to FC/OC and they won't "disappear forever". Besides, it would only help to boost FC/OC wiki popularity and as more people visit it, there would eventually be attempts to clean the site itself.

Popularity and verse size are both relative, there is no borderline that distinguishes "very much and very less" from them. Trademark is a binary system of "has it, or it doesn't", and is easy to track.

Whether or not a continuity has a "good or bad story" is a different matter, and shouldn't be an exception for non-trademark verses. They should only determine whether a trademark verse is valid for the wiki. If one is concerned with "treating all verse equally", then they are mistaken and generally will notice problems arise. All non-trademark verses should be treated equally while all trademark verse are treated equally in their own ways, and infringing on this provides no rationale for disallowing verses like: the illustrated dude on my physics textbook, my OCs, satirical characters from old colonial newspapers, characters from essay competition winning works, people on the news, historical figures, Michael from Vsauce, and religious figures.

 

[Agnaa]

Because it bans verses that we don't want to ban.

If we banned every verse whose name started with S then we'd certainly get rid of Suggsverse, but we'd also get rid of a bunch of other verses that we don't want to ban (the sort of thing you dismiss as just "hurting people's feelings"), AND we're still at risk of someone making Aggsverse that has largely similar issues.

I could just pay $250 and fill out a form and Suggsverse, or any OC verse of my choosing, could get trademarked. People used to say "It has to be published!" until Suggs came along and paid to self-publish. Relying on trademarks presents the same risk and hits verses we don't want it to hit.

Popularity and verse size are both relative, but I think the notability criteria I explained earlier are all fairly objective to analyze.

 

[DnW0]

So basically your point is that there generally is no response to banning non-trademark verses other than "I don't want these verses gone"...

If you can pay money for a trademark on your OC, then do it and prove it, simple enough...

Despite Suggsverse's ridiculousness, it definitely falls under the category of a novel with a storyline and has the right to be published. The matter of banning it isn't about Suggsverse being a self-published verse, it's for a completely different reason.

Your criterion: 1. Must be known outside of vs debating circles.

• Every single verse can simply be made known by telling your best friend to post about it somewhere on facebook. Even if I use an alias or persona I can bypass this. Not every site or franchise records "view count" or "purchase count" anyways and it is virtually impossible to prove this with vague novels and games.

2. Must not be added to the vs battles wiki by its own creator.

• Can't prove it if they just go by an alias.

3. Must have people willing to translate it, or a pre-existing translation must exist if the work was not written in English.

• Doesn't mean much since every single piece of writing can fall under this category.

Ridiculous verses getting added with joke statistics is a completely different matter and will be dealt with on its own. Nothing hurts the site if people can delete them immediately with valid reason and ban them from the wiki as a specificity.

The concern of this thread isn't the future of this site's popularity or the community, or even profile count; it's the system. Deleting a large amount of profiles doesn't hurt the system at all.

 

[Agnaa]

Yeah, my response is "It doesn't solve the issue and causes a bunch of collateral damage", why are you acting like this is a bad response?

Sure, but I'd only want to do it as a last resort. I'd hope that everything I'm presenting can demonstrate to the community that it's reasonably easy to do, and I don't have to doxx myself to stop a regulation from getting passed.

1. I don't think that establishes being known. It has nothing to do with view count or purchase count. It's pretty easy to prove with novels and games, as I can point to discussions about those verses.

2. True, but this is kind of like our rule for "no sockpuppets". It catches enough obvious cases without causing any harm to be a useful rule.

3. That doesn't apply to every single piece of writing. Rakudai has fan translations, Golovachev verse has none. Doctor Who is broadcast in English.

I said nothing about joke statistics. You can have 100 tier 0 characters in a serious verse.

Like my example (that you never responded to btw) showed, you can delete every verse starting with S on the site without hurting the system, but it's still a bad idea if it doesn't address the issue and has unacceptable collateral damage.

 

[DnW0]

I'm not saying your response is bad, nor do I want to bomb all the verses on this site for my own reasons.

I want to highlight that a lot of refutation against trademark-only is filled with some degree of ad hominem that people seem to disregard and need to realize. Also I want to put emphasis on the idea that anyone can definitely bypass any subjective system given enough time and people ought to stop seeking solutions in that field. A lot of people are proposing determination by notoriety or background, and it's not going to make any progress because those can easily be faked.

Yes there is a sockpuppet rule, but how certain can you be to discern a sockpuppet from an original? I would dare to say that a persona wouldn't even be considered a "sockpuppet" because they wouldn't have an alternate account, they're just concealing their true profession through a pair of shaded sunglasses, fake moustache, and a hat.

If you can find a better system, then great... I won't complain nor seek revenge. If trademark-only is enforced and half of the wiki dies, then I'm not going to laugh either.

For response: deleting every single verse starting with S, ...assuming that the wiki has a problem with S-verses... is a fine solution if it really is a problem. It would definitely be better to eliminate them all, remove the problem, and wait for the backlash, than to keep them and cause more complication and opportunities for people to misunderstand, blame the system, use it as a scapegoat, and make effort basically nil.

About Golovachev's works: It's not that Golovachev doesn't have translators, it's that files containing his works have ultimately been removed from the internet and no one has the means to translate a verse that can't be accessed at all. If someone has Golovachev novels, then correct me and I would honestly be interested in a copy of them.

 

[Agnaa]

I think that trademark-only is a bad way of solving the issue. I think the issue is "We don't want verses like Suggsverse", and I think the first 2 of my notability guidelines can stop verses like that much better than trademark-only can.

The only other issue I can imagine people having is something like "We don't want incoherent verses like ASDF movie", which should already be covered by other rules and doesn't need a trademark-only rule to handle it. We could have stricter coherency rules overall, or we could have stricter coherency rules for verses that aren't trademarked. Both of these cause much less collateral damage to verses we're not trying to remove.

That's my misunderstanding on Golovachev's works then, I thought A6colute or someone would have had access to them. But you could easily imagine a verse that has no English translation due to being too obscure, with no-one on the site willing to translate it.

 

[Sera_EX]

@Agnaa

Understood. Sorry for the misunderstanding there.

 

[Antvasima]

@Sera & Dargoo

What would you suggest as solutions to our problems here?

 

[DnW0]

You're misunderstanding the point of the S-verses topic...

I'm not directly talking about people complaining about their verses going byebye...

I'm saying that I can definitely come up with a loophole or way to bypass any of the previously proposed subjective rationale, thus the only solution that will forever eliminate issue should be the only objective rationale that works for this wiki, which is whether a verse is trademarked or not. The point with the statement about people crying about their verses is that, I see, anybody attempting to even bring up the idea of trademark rationale just gets dismissed without further thought because it causes too much "collateral damage". I don't even see why we should be prioritizing the number of profiles on this site if there is the trademark rationale is a solution that eliminates the entire problem altogether.

• Judging verses by popularity won't work. Not all verses have their own wikia and not all verses have an engaging fanbase that bothers to set up discussion about their continuity, you can't determine that a verse in unpopular because there doesn't exist a massive "discussion zone". I doubt toy verses, obscure classic novels, and old works from centuries ago would have their own massive discussion rooms that aren't this wiki, AnimoApps, Comicvine, or Spacebattles. Besides, judging it that way is definitely subjective and I can bypass it by simply setting up subreddits, wordpress, and other discussion rooms. Literally, if a verse is unpopular enough, my discussion rooms would appear as top internet searches and it would totally seem like a "popular verse". Besides, analyzing a verse by this criteria will take forever because you're literally going to be duck-hunting on the internet and the criterion itself is not at all going to put an end to this problem since people obviously have their own ways of regarding popularity and you can't even distinctively determine them as "violating the rules" because you can't objectively determine fame, thus they will upload invalid profiles anyways and there are still going to be more threads asking "what is allowed on this wiki", I doubt anyone would even want to take the role of looking into internet prevalence of every single verse on this wiki
• Filtering sockpuppets is virtually impossible to do if the "sockpuppet" itself doesn't make any indication of being attributed to another account. The concern isn't really even sockpuppets, but authors undergoing personas and uploading their own verses is totally something that can happen and nobody can prevent it.

If you go by trademark criterion, it certainly will solve the problem. If anyone asks whether a verse is allowed, just ask the question of trademark or no trademark and the question is answered instantly. Determining whether a verse was made in violation of rule can be determined with a simple search of whether there exists a trademark. This solves all your skepticism and problems about Youtube profiles, Internet personas, whether SCP is allowed, fan works, and extended works. Easy answered: they aren't allowed if they don't have trademark

I'm going to enforce that this rationale is currently the most optimal solution to the issue and y'all really should not ignore it for your own reasons until you come up with a better idea.

 

[Sera_EX]

So I would appreciate if people stop painting disagreements with the proposal as just users refusing to see the verses they like go, it's a problem with the the justification for the changes, not the changes themselves.

People have literally told me "if it means <insert verse here> will get removed then I'm not down with this." One example is Bambu with Madness Combat because he considers it a legitimate verse.

It's pretty clear they disagree with the justification because it will remove certain verses, if not there would be no reason to reject it - especially when it by no means will axe any significant portion of the site like some have claimed.

 

[Antvasima]

I suppose that the trademark suggestion could be part of the criteria for exclusion, but it should not be the only criteria. For example, it is admittedly hard to precisely gauge a scale for notability, but if a copyrighted work has only had a few hundred readers, we can pretty decisively sift it away as irrelevant.

 

[VenomElite]

How about we just specify exactly what kind of verses are okay here? For example, "comics, animi/manga, television shows, video games, movies, novels" (with canonicity of course). Internet-wise that covers web novels, web comics, and legitimate web series on Youtube, meaning the only things to be removed are advertisements, toys, and flash animations which started this whole mess to begin with IIRC. It's a bit rough but is the best thing I could come up with.

 

[Antvasima]

That may be a good idea, yes.

 

[Sera_EX]

That's kinda where I was eventually going with the whole "copyright + canon + notability" thing. But no one let me finish explaining and started immediately attacking the copyright aspect.

 

[Antvasima]

No problem Sera. As usual, I think that you make good sense.

 

[Agnaa]

@DnW0

Response​

It's not "judging verses by popularity", we're not checking for a certain quota for number of fans, it's checking that some popularity exists outside of battleboards. It's not checking if a wiki exists, although that could support it. It's not trying to find some measure of objective fame, as you suggested later in your post. Toy verses, obscure classic novels, and old works from centuries ago would be allowed by virtue of us knowing that there's a market for them outside of battleboards. imo it would be pretty easy to tell an empty subreddit with 0 discussion from a verse with legitimate discussion avenues. If you were to fake legitimate discussion around it so convincingly that we thought it was real, not only would that be pretty hard to do imo, it would also require the author acting in bad faith to subvert the wiki's rules. It won't be the role of some random staff member to look into internet prevalence of every single verse on the wiki. If there's a suspicious verse a curious member could look into it, or ask the poster to demonstrate that it's notorious outside of battleboards. The "Authors can't upload their own verse" is only meant to exclude users posting on fc-oc from moving their verses here, and to stop some amount of bad-faith actors. It's not the final criteria that's meant to stand on its own to block bad verses, it's meant to work with other criteria to help. And again, bypassing it would require the author acting deliberately around our rules to subvert them. I've tried doing my own trademark searching and it is a complete headache. I almost made a post about how dragonball only has two currently active trademarks, and neither cover the anime/manga, before I realized that I needed to include a space to find the rest of the trademarks. I couldn't find trademarks for "Bleach" since almost all of the results were about the product. And most trademark filings list dozens of objects they're covering a trademark for, making them a pain to wade through. I also kinda feel like trademarking a verse is more of a good faith move from the author than creating secret sockpuppets to simulate active discussion. I'm more inclined to be fine with a requirement if it requires an author acting maliciously against our specific site's rules before it goes wrong.

@Sera There's a difference between "I don't like this rule because it deletes verses I like" and "I don't like this rule because it deletes verses I think are legitimate". The line between these two statements is very fine, but it is there.

@VenomElite Why wouldn't animations include flash animations? Would video games include flash games? It also doesn't solve issues with original character-type works.

Also why would we want to disallow toys? The toys discussion was initially sparked by someone making an IRL profile for a NERF gun, which was obviously disallowed, but was defended with the example of some dinosaur toys with lore that are part of a greater story. I don't know why stuff like that would need to be deleted.

 

[Sera_EX]

By the way, I personally believe Madness Combat to be permissible anyway. As proven by Bambu it has a significantly sized audience (millions of followers). That's notable enough for me.

 

[Agnaa]

By the way, I personally believe Madness Combat to be permissible anyway. As proven by Bambu it has a significantly sized audience (millions of followers). That's notable enough for me.

Doesn't this fail the copyright requirement in the copyright + canon + notability metric?

 

[Sera_EX]

Nope. Everything is technically copyrighted. It also has canon and is popular enough.

 

[Agnaa]

Then, again, if everything's copyrighted then why not just do canon + notability like I'm suggesting?

 

[DnW0]

Faking comments on youtube, likes on social media, followers, skewing poll results and ratings, botting. People have done and can do it faster and more efficiently than one probably thinks. I can buy 100000 followers on facebook, reddit upvotes, even bots to send random obscure comments. People can make a verse look popular if I just have people comment opinions without any knowledge on the verse itself.

Judging if they simply are known outside of VSB is a criterion even more mellow than judging a verse by author background, and can easily be subverted. Going by this criterion, literally any verse that exists on the internet is allowed on the site, even if I wrote a story that got published on a school newspaper. Doesn't solve much of the problem.

 

[Sera_EX]

A toy with lore is still a toy.

Welp...looks like we're back at square one. I'm losing my patience.

 

[DnW0]

If you're losing your patience, then enforce the Trademark or no Trademark criteria because it works, and that should be all that matters.

The solution is laid out and I don't know why people are hesitating on consideration.

 

[VenomElite]

@Agnaa

Flash animations are predominantly fan fiction sprite battles and stick fights. You can make exceptions for extraordinary ones, but that's about it.

 

[Antvasima]

I would appreciate if you stick to this discussion Sera, as it is important, and I do not have enough available time and focus.

You can ask other staff members that you trust to comment here if you wish.

 

[Sera_EX]

Also, assuming people will manipulate statistics such as views and so forth goes against the #1 Fandom policy which is assuming good faith. But that's besides the point.

 

[Antvasima]

@DnW0

This is still supposed to be a staff only discussion. Agnaa is honorary staff (due to refusing a promotion a few times), as is VenomElite (as he is retired staff), so they are acceptable, but this discussion is hard enough to manage as it is without regular members commenting.

 

[Agnaa]

@DnW0 Likes on social media, followers, poll results, and ratings all tell us nothing about whether those numbers are related to battleboards or not. YouTube comments might not tell us a whole lot either, but the tough part of those is simulating actual conversations, rather than just getting 1000 bots to post near-identical comments all not engaging with each other or the video.

Yeah I don't know about Lord Dunsany, nor do I know about a lot of popular fictional verses. If you search up Masadaverse you have trouble getting stuff outside of battleboards because that name was created for it by battleboards, and because you're searching in English for a Japanese work. We know that it sold well enough in Japan to deserve the production of multiple installments, and that's all we need to know.

That's why the criteria of "battleboards" and not "VSBW" is used.

If Ant wants to kick this discussion off of the thread, I'm happy to continue it on my wall.

@Sera And a story that you purchase with a toy is still a story.

@VenomElite Sure, but just saying "We allow animations" isn't enough information to exclude flash animations. You'd have to say "We allow animations that aren't fan fiction sprite battles or stick fights, but that might still have issues.

 

[Sera_EX]

Even if we went with Agnaa's suggestion, that leaves room for exploitation via fan fiction and original verses. When I say "original" I'm not talking about a verse you yourself created, but let's say one I created that someone else could try and host here via that exploitation. Everything is technically copyrighted yes but multiple FC/OC verses can have both canon and notability. We need to differentiate official from merely original.

That is...unless we take Cal's advice and just straight up say we won't accept those, which means Ven's solution is the best, granted we might can reword it a little.

 

[VenomElite]

@Agnaa

I didn't generalize animations though. I directly specified anime and television/movies.

 

[Agnaa]

I mean, if you create a verse that gains popularity outside of battleboards and someone else tries to host here, I don't really see an issue with that.

Sure but if multiple FC/OC verses have both canon and notability then how do we differentiate those which we do allow (like Madness Combat) from those which we don't? When they all have canon and notability but lack "copyright" in the strictest sense.

 

[Sera_EX]

If you search up Masadaverse you have trouble getting stuff outside of battleboards because that name was created for it by battleboards, and because you're searching in English for a Japanese work.

Well...just type in "Paradise Lost (Light), Dies irae, Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyoujin/Bansenjin, or Kajiri Kamui Kagura" and you'll most certainly get English results unrelated to battle forums. VNDB should be the first to pop up.

Also, run by me what you mean by "story with a toy" again? Because of it's anything like Transformers, you know those are perfectly fine by me.

Edit: You'll have to take that up with Bambu, I don't know much about Madness Combat personally.

 

[Agnaa]

@VenomElite Oh, my bad. I'm guessing cartoons would fall under television then? How would web series stay if they're not television shows or movies? How do we define a movie? Because if it's just "shown in a cinema" then that excludes direct to dvd movies. The timeframe seems like a metric I don't take issue with, but that still wouldn't allow youtube web series, and would allow a verse created by one of the users on the site.

I forget who, but someone made a movie for a school project which they ended up selling at local stores and putting on youtube. I've forgotten the user, so if anyone remembers this discussion I'd appreciate if they could link the thread.

@Sera I mean stuff like Omega T-Rex and Thrasher T-Rex, Jurassic Park toys with official descriptions that supposedly scale them to other Jurassic Park pages. The pages themselves seem badly made, but these are the sorts of things I'm talking about, and the sorts of things that were brought up in the toy profiles thread.

 

[Sera_EX]

Well, the only issue may be power-scaling and some form of alternative canon thing that we'd have to discuss later. I think they should be fine though.

 

[Agnaa]

To respond to your edit: I mean, you said it seemed okay, and I think it's an incredibly important point that you consider some verses with canon and notability but no copyright valid, and other verses with canon and notability but no copyright invalid. Are there any examples you're more familiar with that you could explain in relation to this?

And to your new post: I 100% agree, that's why I think toy verses shouldn't automatically be excluded.