ed. this thread has since widened in scope. join the text format guerrilla campaign today!

ed. 2 oh my god it's HAPPENING

BotB deserves a text-based format! Verse would be for traditional and modern poetry, lyrics, and even epic narrative poems.

The site already supports .txt entries (see ascii) and it would be fun for BotBrs to stretch a totally different set of creative muscles.

But… what class would it be?

the ascii format used to allow creative writing, but see that the lyceum article now states that due to certain 'unsavory incidents', literature is now strictly not allowed. I can't recall on the spot the exact 'unsavory incident' that led to it so i leave that research to you, but it's.. kind of spicy.

However! I do think that other than prose, a subgenre of Human Voice for lyrical and verse form writing would be nice, if anything just to add wholesome musical value to whatever mischievous message people may conjure up

i personally dont see why we shld still stay away from literature because some silly kids in 2013/14 used to upload porn fanfictions about botbrs. this can simply be moderated and communicated well. people also dont submit ansi porn all the time or draw genitals etc etc

i still think ascii shld be for art only because it gives gfxist points, not writist points. but im not against having a new point class with new formats. i feel like the community is a little more grown up now~

ah, i had already read that on the ascii article… i think i saw somewhere it was to do with people writing explicit fanfic about other BotBrs. since that didn’t kill the entire ascii format though i thought it must be something about long-form prose specifically, rather than the entire concept of text entries.

that’s what got me thinking about how to implement some kind of creative writing format without the potential for…that kind of stuff.

with heavy-handed “no explicit nsfw” moderation it could mayb work? or flies too close to the sun. who knowse.

YES! I am feeling desire to read at entries of a dragon themed bitpack verse format battle!

here is the specific "unsavory incident" https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/1279

i actually would prefer an over-arching text format that could include prose as well, so we could do XHB short story battles and the like. i was considering hosting "storytelling" battles with vocal as the format, but text would be much more accessible (that way you don't have to both write and record, or if you can't/don't want to record...)

regardless i'm very supportive of this idea, just think expanding the concept would be prudent!

dami since the verse format would necessitate the creation of a new “writist” class, it could act as a testbed for more text formats such as “fiction”, “non-fiction”, “alltext” (just throwing out ideas here). like a probation period to prove the community is mature enough to handle that kind of power…

i guess what i'm proposing is "alltext" as a starter and then if it ends up being a popular style of battle here, other more specific formats could follow

edit: also thinking about file formats and what should be allowed and disallowed... some level of word processor formatting might be nice so i was thinking .txt .rtf .doc .docx

doc(x) is for paid microsoft office stuff right? rather make it openoffice odt instead. ;D

idk if we rly need more than one format for this. wld go too far into graphic design again imo.
raw text is raw text. writing. nothing else needed, if u ask me-

(if we do want to allow some markup in the text (we probably don't) it should just be firki imo)

firki markup ohb: https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/4588

HTML5 offers a set of formatting tools. too.

Text-only without format, for, sounds good to me.

i guess i'm just thinking about text-decorations like italics, bold, strikethru etc, and easier access to stuff like em dashes, text-align and other word processor formatting things. i would prefer them if i were writing a short story, and it's possible to push them to the forefront if you're trying to write something postmodern :D (verse OR prose!!)

i suppose i don't feel super strongly about it being more than plaintext, but if the format is intended to encompass "alltext" it's worth considering. it's cool either way!

i figured .doc and .docx were easy to manage at this point with open or libre office or google drive but if they're actually still gated in some way then i wouldn't want them included either

problem with docx , i think, still is that it looks different everytime u load it in a different editor. even if its just by a few pixels of text or image placements etc.. rly annoying...
or was this fixed in the past few years where i only did .tex stuff


.................

SPEAKING OF LATEX

I can benefit from participating on LaTeX

format battles!

i haven't used .docx in quite some time, but if that has been the case in the past that's tentatively a good reason to leave just that one off the list

I am feeling desire to write right now, and the format proposed on this thread came to my mind, soon after I began to: I am finding myself looking forward to witness x hour competitons of, and participate in.

docx and rtf have essentially the same problems

i like the idea !!!1

the dawn of the plaintext format is peeking out over the horizon...

I think this should be made

pdf? *hides

hear ye, year ye

the people want alltext

I'm also in favor of this! Let the battle of the biterature exist >:00

I could imagine this being so cool in XHBs where there's a prompt and seeing other people's submissions and what they write. Especially when hosting. I'm all for this format.

Would love this! BotB poetry, pretty please. (Although this could be battled lots of interesting ways)

bumping this because it was just mentioned in the xhb vlog thread

for the record:
- i think it's a good idea, just not entirely sure puke would be on board with it
- i'm surprised nobody outside of tristendo's brought up pdf. a ton of free methods out there support it (even google docs), so if alltext would be a legit format, the safest bet (as in, the file format with the most features and least amount of problems) for file format would probably be that.
- gravity break's already done this by now and afaik no weird shit's happened on there with their writing compos; it should be used as an example case to wage an educated guess as to what to expect from this format

if this does end up being a format i think we should have it be the same battle length as sample bits/mario pants where its random and not one hour

hey folks sorry i haven't commented on this yet

i really do like the idea of an alltext format
but i think the only viable file format is .txt

i agree .pdf is ubiquitous and highly accessible to all
and there are even free tools like LaTeX
that's why it should be its own format

let's say, just for the sake of argument, there was a video game manual battle that used alltext as the only format and both .txt and .pdf were available filetypes -- how would you feel if you wrote and submitted yours in .txt and then saw another entry looking something akin to the GunTneR manual

...yeah ... so ...how about both a .txt alltext format
and a .pdf pdf format format?

wow puke, thanks for saying hi and approving of my idea!!!

gotta agree with everything in your comment. there is certainly a unique purity to the perfectly austere plain text file. others

have recognised it.

also - although 'alltext' was my coinage i'm now having pause. perhaps plaintext would be a better format name, because i feel like a lot of people would read 'alltext' and assume it would be like 'allgear' and so they could use any word processor and submit docx, pdf, etc. thoughts?

ha, even though i like the ring of alltext, i do agree with your point, which makes plaintext probably a better name

pdf too? hecks yeah

excited for these!

puke coming in with the approval + better idea asap!! yea if alltext is just gonna be txt plaintext would be a better format name in the long run, lest we have ppl submitting .gmi files...unless

puke7++