Man, after crypto-trade got hacked, too. I know there's still cryptsy. Have any other exchanges added a DVC/BTC pairing?

 Not that I'm aware of, though that would be useful. So far the easiest thing would be to search for your own username, and then see which rating pages you show up on.

Check out the rubric page linked above and you'll see the exact values given for each criteria.

I agree, it would be a problem if the rubric for fiction included links and references, but fortunately this is not an issue. The fiction rubric doesn't include links/references. The thirty points for links/references only applies to non-fiction. http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_rater#rating_method

I've been doing ratings for the past two rounds, and I wanted to draw attention to the ratings system for writers who may not be familiar with it (I haven't been keeping up with the thread for the past few weeks, so if a similar post was made-- well, I guess I wouldn't be sorry because it's an important subject). This influences whether you are actually getting paid one share per thousand words, or less. This is the standard devtome rating rubric (http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_rater#rating_method). It has just CHANGED, and weights links and references for non-fiction article at 30/99 instead of 10/99. While we use an article as an example, the AUTHOR is also being rated.

I've noticed that even when I'm finding really neat articles, I end up docking them a lot of points because of the lack of links and references, and pictures. No links, references, or pictures? Bam, minus 39 points (used to be minus 19 points), right there. It takes a little extra time, but going through and putting in some links to resources, or articles that corroborate or contrast your opinion, and giving sources for your facts is really useful and important. How do we know where all your figures are coming from, otherwise? This is a hypertextual medium, and I'd encourage writers to take advantage of it. Adding a couple of pictures (you can find CC-BY-SA pictures at commons.wikimedia.org or via the search feature at creativecommons.org) also gives you up to 9 more points. Do yourself a favor.

On the other hand, don't rely on sprinkling in a few links and pictures to raise your rating. If I'm assigned an article that's a typo-laden, short-hand outline (which happens fairly often), I'm going to rate accordingly.

I just want to put this out there so people who are writing good stuff can maximize their earnings.

Groceries. Either through gift cards to retailers like Wholefoods (or an option to buy gift cards for smaller retailers).

I got one, too. I suspect it's about the issue below.


Also, Matt2838, who started altcoincards.com, says the reason the site is down is because of a hosting merger.

Yeah, hopefully it's just something simple, site maintenance, etc.

I just PMed Max2838 about it (they wrote the initial message announcing it). We'll see what they say about it.

Anybody know what's up with altcoincards.com? Was gonna go spend some devcoin and all the internal links 'can't be found.'

It sounded so low I wanted to clarify and make sure you weren't describing something hypothetical (like in earlier parts of the discussion). Maybe I should have written... IS it just ONE share per TEN hours? ...And it would have been clearer.

EDIT: Forgot to add, part of the reason this surprised me so much was that I just got a one share bounty for writing a short review of a devcoin wallet installer.


I'd say it definitely encourages lifestyle authors of written material at this point. It might also encourage people who are not using it in the spirit it was intended. But if it went to the lifestyle developer=certain number of shares, you'd probably have to have the dedicated pool of developers *first*, transition the program, then there'd be a lot fewer shares that would be worth more. You'd also theoretically be able to up the number of shares given to lifestyle developers for their work (for instance if that section in a receiver file looked like devtome earnings currently does)

I was wondering about this for photography. Like if someone posted ten pictures of different angles of their lamp... (in such a way that was useful or artistic to no one). I think it would require a pretty big dedicated staff to review submissions, or maybe an application process for contributors who can prove they produce real content, so not practical right now.

Far as I know, yes.


Well we already have, in the software development side of things, a distinction between "any old crap you choose to come up with" and "stuff we actually need".

So maybe we could do the same with other media?

[/quote]

That's the tricky part with 'no notability requirements.' Where's the line drawn for 'what we need' and how is it determined? For instance, a lot of really good quality storytelling in various media ISN'T popular (indie films, live storytellings, self-published books), and a lot of crap (helloooo many hollywood movies) IS really popular, so popularity (for instance) is not necessarily a reliable criteria.

Is it one share per ten hours?


This intrigues me, because ideally I think you're right that the audience should be people who 'naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.' Even within that model there could be room for one-time or not-that-often contributors.

I've got 200k + word I could *conceivably* post on Devtome, but I won't, because it's not polished, or not finished. I'll post it when it's ready. I care about creating quality writing. I'm really passionate about gift economies and openness, so in spirit I really liked free culture licenses, but I clung to the non-commercial clause out of fear of abuse. Investigating Devtome and looking at Sita Sings the Blues http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ convinced me to put my licensing in line with my beliefs. So I spend 40 + hours a week writing that will now all be published under CC BY-SA. I think all those elements make it natural for me to gravitate toward Devtome.

I think a ton of other writers would, too, once they got over their hangups about copyright (which is rampant in the writer world, for a number of reasons, some of which are they they *care* about and *value* what they are producing, but also hubris around 'originality'), and were able to see that they can meet their material needs with Devcoin. Devtome has attracted a few of those, but also a lot of people who are fine with putting out 'open source' material because they *don't* care about what they're producing.

The Devtome model as it stands now isn't perfect, but it's a place to start.

How would you propose shifting it to paying ongoing writing 'developers'? I think you'd need to wait to do it until you had a stable of committed, high quality authors.

Maybe I'm just being sensitive, but this discussion seems to be escalating and I don't know if that's productive. This is just a discussion on a forum thread-- brainstorming, opinions, et cetera. What's actually implemented is a system that pays creators for creating, currently limited to writing. Personally I'd look at how the project has actually manifested as opposed to unmanifested ideas.

The limitations and challenges of expanding the system to include other content such as music have already been outlined. They will take time and people-power to implement, and that's just a logistical reality at this point.

I'm kind of confused by why this project would exclude a musical equivalent of Devtome. The equivalent of what you're describing for writing would be an AI that can output readable and uniquely stylistic prose, but that's not what Devtome asks for. It relies on human generated content and the ability to share and remix that content. How are people going to crawl into my closed source brain to see how I think of topics, conceptualize storylines, and string sentences together? Would there be a category that said, "I want a low-sci-fi voice tagged first-person and dark humor vs an academic voice tagged archaic english lexicon?" (Definitely an interesting concept that I wouldn't have thought of without this discussion). It seems more practical to put the writing up, and also put explain the writing process if there's enough interest for it.

I think the CC BY-SA license and opensource are highly compatible concepts, but they're not strictly the same thing. There might be a demand for open-source voice synthesizers and that is a very different project than human generated content that is not locked away by copyright. Both are valid, and the degree of their implementation will depend on the demand.

With CC BY-SA wouldn't that just mean that whatever music the artist posted could be remixed under those terms however someone wanted? And if the artist felt really inspired they could also post the ingredients to the track, such as samples, separate vocal tracks, transcripts, etc? I think some Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en) artists release under CC BY-SA.

I think this is a perfect example of it being buried. It's *there*, but it's still hard to find. Under the Business section there's a link to Where To Spend Your Altcoins article, which is probably how I found it originally. It's buried under a lot of information, though, and the label 'business' could be misleading, since that's a term typically aimed toward people who want to sell things, rather than people who want to buy things.

'Shopping' exists as a category (http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=category:shopping&s[]=shopping), but it's not listed under any of the topics on the mainpage. It's not under commerce, devcoin, or devtome. Even searching simply for 'shopping,' it's the eighth search result. If there's a prominent page where it's linked, I haven't been able to find it, though that's not to say I didn't miss it.

The topic tree is also inconsistent. Some of the links lead to category pages, some directly to articles. This can also be confusing for people trying to categorize their articles who find that a 'category' doesn't exist.

More interlinking will help (I'm trying to add pertinent links to sections as I find them).

For prevention in the future:

I know there are people who search content for plagiarism, since right after I put this up http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=the_trap I got a PM about how I needed to take it down because it was also uploaded to Smashwords, which has a copyright notice. I explained that authors retain copyright at Smashwords and it was already licensed under CC BY-SA, so everything was fine.

Is each and every article run through a web-based plagiarism checker, or do new writers get checked and then there are periodic spot checks? It might be helpful to post this information on the main 'get set up with Devtome' pages so that people can be aware of the process, and it might help discourage people intending the work the system.

As for the penance, I'm a little confused about the 'all but 5 million' part. Notabot later said they would send all earnings and holding nothing back. It does seem better to be held accountable instead of quitting, but I'll leave it to the admins to figure out the particulars. Notabot sounded sincere in their explanation, and I like to believe there will be follow-through, but I also wonder if there is some kind of guarantee that can be placed.

On a note not pertaining directly to Notabot/Fheenix, but plagiarism relating to open-source in general: The good-faith nature of free culture licenses relies on the fact that if someone claims someone else's work as their own, they get called on it and it also depreciates their reputation. This disincentive is less powerful when someone doesn't have a solid, unified web presence (the pseudo-anonymity of screen names). I suppose the only answer I can think of is that if a community acts in integrity in general, and acts in integrity and fairness when cases like this arise, it encourages those who act in good-faith to stick around, and those who don't to drop out.

I run into this, too. The search function also has limits. The other day I spent at least half an hour looking for this article (http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=where_to_spend_your_cryptocurrencies) with search terms like 'where to spend devcoin,' 'spend devcoin', 'buy with devcoin,' etc. NOTHING. I couldn't remember how I found it, couldn't find a link to it... I finally had to remember one of the names of the actual businesses to get a hit in the top twenty search results.

I think something that would help with this is interlinking articles more when they are relevant. If you see another author's article that you like and is relevant to yours, put a link in the body of your text or 'see more' section ala Wikipedia.

Another thing that could be done is to create new categories for 'opinion pieces,' 'informative articles,' et cetera.

I think this is the main issue, and it had pretty much the same reasoning as why visual art and photography are not yet supported. The project is young and the admin base is small and doing the best they can on a skeleton crew. I think that if openness is demonstrated through portal translations into a couple of other major languages that focus on specific markets (like German), with the caveat that for now only English is accepted because of staff limitations, that could be the seed of a bunch of Germans getting on board with the project and heading up a German branch/version that has its own checks and balances and way to check for plagiarism in the native language.

I think it's still worth it. English is required curriculum in Germany and many other countries. I know quite a few people from Germany, Sweden, and Finland who speak better English than native English speakers, and that's just what they learned in school, not because their job required it or anything. English is also one of the lingua franca of Europe, so there's a lot of English discourse on the internet. Countries such as those also have a lot higher percentage of population that is into things like opensource and p2p.

Even though that audience would by default be able to read the page in English, including it in other languages is evidence of openness. Eventually that could lead to Devtome being a multi-lingual project. For now a writing sample could be required to see if their English meets standard.