Jon B., the pro/con was a lot of work and really helpful. I appreciate it a lot because I was going to volunteer to do one and I thought it would crush me. You rule.

Jon, you totally rock. Thank you for doing all of the pro-con stuff. I know i'm not right minded enough to handle that.

Also thank you for the ballot and the preamble.

If posisble, the Preamble I'd like to see:

The last Buffy episode has been aired in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc., and some of our threads have become redundant. It's housecleaning time! To the extent possible, it's best to get this all out of the way now, before the US fall TV season begins.

In addition, we recently learned that our current usage is overloading our server. We areworking on coding changes to improve this, so there's no need to panic and implement draconian cuts, but removing redundancies on our board will help the situation because more open threads usually leads to more posts, pages loaded and database. Think of our current situation as thread sprawl. Consolidating threads will be a bit like carpooling, allowing our system to operate more effectively.

That's a good change to the preamble, Kat. I'll add it in.

oops. . . Dropped word in there, Jon. I hope you grabbed it.

The last Buffy episode has been aired in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc., and some of our threads have become redundant. It's housecleaning time! To the extent possible, it's best to get this all out of the way now, before the US fall TV season begins.

In addition, we recently learned that our current usage is overloading our server. We are working on coding changes to improve this, so there's no need to panic and implement draconian cuts, but removing redundancies on our board will help the situation because more open threads usually leads to more posts, more pages loaded and more database usage. Think of our current situation as thread sprawl. Consolidating threads will be a bit like carpooling, allowing our system to operate more effectively.

• **

One too many mojitos before posting.

I threadsucked. Betsy HP, askye, brenda m, SeanK, SA, and Fay didn't think it belonged with the rest. Consuela, Katie M, and ita had no problems with consolidation. DavidS didn't want any of them consolidated. SeanK, Consuela, and Jess PMoon said they'd be OK with cutting the thread entirely.

To be honest, I'd prefer cutting the thread entirely than combining it with Due South and Smallville. I can always have impromtu Farscape conversations in either Natter or Bitches, but I really have no interest in Due South, Smallville, or Stargate.

t /eleventh hour two cents

At this point, I'd say that if we want to cut Farscape, that we propose it afterwards as a separate vote.

The voting page is up.

I'll post something in Press, and then I'm going to bed.

I have a correction to offer in the voting.....

There are 14 Firefly eps, 3 which have not aired in the US. A 15th was not filmed.

3. We should close and archive the Firefly quotable thread as soon as technically possible.

Pro: There are only 12 episodes out there so this can easily be folded into the regular Firefly thread.

Con: 3 of those 12 episodes have not yet aired in the US. We should wait until sometime after the complete series is released on DVD in December before closing this thread.

Essentially:

Serenity (2 hours)
The Train Job
Bushwhacked
Shindig
Safe
Our Mrs. Reynolds
Jaynestown
Out of Gas
Dead or Alive (not filmed)
Ariel
War Stories
Trash (not US)
The Message (not US)
Heart of Gold (not US)
Objects in Space (restored)

Fixed. And this thread is now closed.

Go vote.

erinaceous' Proposal:

I (erinaceous) propose that the board agree to individual members allowing their posts to be added to the American National Corpus, in order to further language scholarship and research (and not incidentally make it easier to get ‘foamy’ in the dictionary).

Information on the ANC is here; [link]

How will it work?

First of all, only currently closed threads will be eligible for the ANC. Which ones, yet, are not determined, but most likely Natter, Music, and the Show/Spoiler Threads. Bitches will not be one of the threads (too much personal info). Unamericans/Canadians will not be included, either (supposed to be for American English). FanFiction and San Sacre will not be included (too hard to separate fiction from nonfiction).

Secondly, individual posters have to opt in by sending me an email, the text of which is below (linky goodness should also happen here), giving permission. You do not have to use your real name to give permission, only your user name.

Thirdly, I (erinaceous) will be doing the stripping out of non-opt-in-ers, so no UnBuffista eyes will see the data until posts from people who don’t want their posts included in the ANC have been removed.

Fourthly, the posts, once in the hands of the ANC, will be further anonymized: all screen names and personal names will be replaced by tags that say "SCREEN NAME" and "PERSONAL NAME", essentially.

The posts will be part of a 200 million word corpus of American English, used mainly by language researchers and lexicographers to figure out how people actually write and speak. It’s difficult to get online material that is both reasonably good English (although of course I think the Buffistas are more than reasonably good writers of English!) and organized enough to be of value. Contributing your posts will help to advance language research in the U.S. a great deal.

TEXT OF PERMISSION EMAIL: By submitting this e-mail, I, _______________ (user name), hereby grant to the American National Corpus Consortium (ANCC), a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reformat, reproduce, and distribute through the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania, in electronic form or any and all media hereinafter developed, my anonymized posts to the Phoenix Board/Buffistas.org as part of a collection of American English-language material. I agree to the terms of use (outlined here: [link] and understand that the collection will be made available to others for the purposes of linguistic education, research, and development.

Betsy is a big ol' ditz who didn't realize the proposal was already seventeenth or it wouldn't be in Lightbulbs.