All the latest Backrooms news of the month!
Hello folks!
It’s that time again! I, ReyDay, have returned with
Praetor3005 and
Super-Robot14, and we’re here to give you all of the silly summaries that y’all crave.
Please do leave suggestions for what to include in the monthly newsletter, we’ll probably include it! We love your feedback. :3
We have a winner!
"Cubes cannot be hot" the cube in question:
Mascotcon is over! After a month of posting and a week of voting, the community has made their choice!
380 of you voted on which mascot you wanted to represent the site, and it's been a close one! But we now have a clear winner: Tesseract, by centurys lute and
akarine147 !
A huge thank you to every artist who participated to the contest, whether you deleted your participation or not. It has been delightful to discover how the site logos and features could be used in characters, and every entry has showcased incredible creativity. Participations are still available to be seen in the mascotartcon2024 contest hub.
You can expect Tess to appear in different parts of the wiki, whether it is the home page or other site hubs. The discord will also feature emotes or stickers related to them in the future. If you are an artist, feel free to submit ideas or art for those, as well as suggestions on where Tess could appear!
centurys lute and
akarine147 are currently holding a discord forum thread to gather suggestions on emote ideas to draw. If you want to help them, you can dump some ideas there for them!
The Revival of the GLMP
New logo by LiminalDoctor!
Thanks to the work of DivineAtlas, we recently had a complete overhaul of both the Critic Server and the Greenlighter Mentoring Program on Discord. Indeed, while the GLMP worked on training new greenlighters to help them make better critics and develop their literacy skills, the Critic Server has been left in the dust as a consequence, which didn't allow for most people to be able to help each other and learn by seeing other people's advice.
Therefore, the two servers have been merged. While greenlighters still have places where they can vote on features or rewrite perms, as well as training people who want to become greenlighters, the system is now much more public, and critics can also join to help each other and learn how to give more helpful advice to people.
In addition, we also have a new role on the discord server, called "Star Critic". It can be earned by being nominated by a staff member or a greenlighter for someone who demonstrates exceptional activity in both the discord and the site forums. Star Critics are able to discuss and vote for the monthly featured pages, so if that is something that appeals to you, try and leave an impression!
If you want to join the program, you can go to our Discord server in the "meet the critics" channel and create a critic profile there. Once done, a staff member will give you the pingable critic role, which will grant you access to the server.
We hope to see you there!
Promptcon is happening!
The prompts in question:
With the end of an art contest comes the last writing contest of the year! And this time, we're making something a little different. For almost three years we have tried to make contests bring light to new categories (like phenomecon2023, or underused categories (like canonicon2024) and themes (like classicon2023). However, Promptcon completely shatters this habit. As a parallel of Backtober, authors have to, this time, write an article using at least one of the 31 prompts of the event, and are encouraged to use more than one in order to challenge themselves.
We are currently in the posting period, and there is a week left before posting! So if you wanna participate, remember to post your entry using the prompt2024 posting password November 15th 2024!
Whether you participate in the contest or not, we would also love to hear your thoughts about the theme! Should prompts have been more specific, or maybe a minimum should have been present? or should the contest have had a more defined and cohesive theme? Let us know on our discord by creating a community feedback thread!
Reading Nights
We did these. They're fun, join 'em.
What we do in these Reading Nights is basically, well, reading! We all hop in a VC and read the same page, then discuss them. Currently we're trying to do multiple for both American timezones (PST-EST) and then also other times for people on the other side of the globe (like for Europeans). We've done a few and I hope that we can do some more!
If you have ideas for pages we should read together, or themes and stuff to look for, let us know! A few people have worked to make these possible such as ReyDay and
Super-Robot14. Make sure to tell them they're cool. (wait one of them is me :o)
Repairs and Upgrades!
AI replacement art for Icarus Procidens that was made by yours truly.
We’ve had a number of site repairs and upgrades this month!
For starters, we’ve had a BUNCH of non-CC and AI-generated images replaced this month by various artists and photographers! We kindly thank each and every participant in this project, we are so much closer to being 100% CC-compliant!
We’d like to thank the following users for their contributions:
- SilverFaust does not match any existing user name
- sdz on Discord
- EvilBuuMoment on Discord
- Guy777
- ReyDay1
The following pages have had images replaced in the past month:
- Level 0.2
- Level 148
- Level 285
- Level 371
- Level 888
- Level 990
- Entity 37
- Entity 89
- Entity 97
- Icarus Procidens
Along with this, a bunch of older pages have had license boxes added to them! Yippee! Thank you to all of the staff and helpers (mostly pnn wepm) who took time to help us make progress in this department!
Note from Rey: Folks, if a page of yours doesn’t have a license box, please add it! It helps us staff tremendously and helps the wiki become more CC-compliant by having all licensing information in one spot. For more information, visit our Licensing Guide.
Secondly, we've added the ariane-circle and church-of-the-veiled tags for the groups with the same names!
Thirdly, we now have an Art Gallery! This is where you can find all of the art pages posted by our various artists! Make sure to stop by and appreciate these absolutely wonderful masterpieces.
Last but certainly not least, we've updated the translations component to include more branches! It now includes the following branches:
- Arabic Branch(AR)
- German Branch(DE)
- Thai Branch(TH)
- Toki Pona Branch(TOK)
Rey’s nerdy stats or whatever
If you know me, you know I love numbers. My favorite page is probably How Many Pages, and with the encouragement of a suggestion from last month's newsletter, Prae and Robot have made the mistake of dedicating an entire block to my findings. How fun!
In the later weeks of the month, I sent out a survey to collect some data about our site's activity demographic and to predict how much progress would be made with Cluster 12 in the next year. Here's what I've found:
- 46.4% of people who filled out the survey were authors3
- 70.4% of people who filled out the survey plan on posting a level in the next year.
- There are about 78 predicted numbered levels coming out in the next year.
- There are about 24 predicted numbered entities coming out in the next year
- There are about 163 predicted objects coming out in the net year4
- There are about 20 predicted phenomena coming out in the next year.
A part of the survey was dedicated to category popularity as well. Users were asked to rank the categories from favorite to least favorite in regards to how much they liked to read them. The average rankings are as follows:
1. Levels - 2.89
2. Objects - 3.22
3. Phenomena - 3.74
4. Entities - 3.89
5. Groups - 4.52
6. Tales - 5.37
7. Joke Pages - 5.85
8. POI's - 5.93
Concluding this section, while unrelated to the survey, these are the total pages posted this month:
- 5 levels have been posted (including translations and unnumbereds)
- 1 (rewritten) entity was posted
- 1 (translated) object was posted
- 1 group was posted
- 1 tale was posted
- 8 art pages were posted
Here are the pages posted this month for those of you that are curious:
Written pages:
- Level 16-FR translated by LouIou
- Level 948 by Greggita Mahayfaio
- Paradise 772 by Charles Delameuh
- Level 412 by InspectingCritters
- the_shadow_spiral by AtomMudman
- Entity 73 by Spectre48
- Object PT-2 by Ultra16Bits
- Houses of the Holy by Spectre48
- The Neith Division by OH-21
Art pages:
- Tesseract by centurys lute and
akarine147
- Hvou by Super-Robot14
- Zip by Beecha
- moonday by Error012
- A Small Place by Error012
- Say Cheese! by Ambersight
- Void Void by Error012
- Chesseract by cakelord114514
Staff and GLMP updates
While we lost an admin this month in the person of scutoid studios leaving due to inactivity, we also got a few staff promotions! Following their dedication,
Super-Robot14 (this is Praetor typing I swear he's not being full of himself) and
CamaradeAlbabar have been promoted to moderator after their respective jstaff period. We also saw the return of
Spectre48 as moderator, helping staff deal with disc-related cases and changes.
On another note, C-Graph has also come back as a greenlighter!
Features + POTW
We have a wonderful lineup of features this month, so let's take a peek into what these amazing pages have in store!
We also have a number of excellent art features this month!
- Tess playing Chess by
cakelord114514
- A scene from Lake of Fire by
OH-21 for Backtober
- A render of Level 148 by SilverFaust does not match any existing user name
- A few drawings of the Ring Master by
Justazappyrat
- A drawing of Tesseract by Blu
- A drawing of Entity 2 by
Abdallah Amr
Last but not least, here are the inducted pages of the (respective) weeks during the past month:
Cool! Love to see the progress that'll be made in November!! Sghfjh so excited;
@pearbranch14823
Good job folks, lets keep going forward TROPICAL STORM!!!
amen
U.E. Menzies
“Spec goes on a WILD— see what I did there?”
DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDI—
Fire post as always
LMAOOOO I love you too spec
Hmmm, I wonder who this
pnn wepm person adding licenseboxes is? I heard they're incredibly handsome.