UnSignpost:UnSignpost/20140520
Two more Uncyclopedians leave
- By Spike
This issue we bid farewell to two more Uncyclopedians of long standing. Abuse Filter 16, which came to the site long before I started using Filters to gently coax authors to do something more original than point to what some dope had posted at Conservapedia, gave a warning to any new user who created an article with a number in it, such as 1947 Horse-Throwing Competition. It delivered its final welcome to Escapian; he was in the process of documenting the inherently funny 1964 Chicago Cubs and has not been heard from since.
Abuse Filter 20 was a one-night stand by cheerful Wikia intern Furry to pattern-match the ramblings of one specific vandal. It slowed him down (the vandal, that is), but alas, he was clever enough to figure out exactly what was being pattern-matched and type something different but equally trite. AF20 has been disabled and its contents made visible to the public — who will see that it is now again open season on typing dick, cock, and penis into articles.
One of Uncyclopedia's chronic vandals phoned home from Staffordshire recently. This reporter dares not name him, for fear of being banned by a surviving Abuse Filter. Although this vandal is always anxious for us to know who he is, and to receive his subliminal urgings to run to the bathroom, he is also too smart to be shut down by an Abuse Filter, unless it were to trip on every ALL-CAPITAL-LETTER CHANGE SUMMARY, which would mean losing half of the remaining users. In any case, this vandal bores more easily than he used to.
What shall we do with the site banner?
Outrage was caused by the site's banner this week as wildlife authorities protested wildly about the content on our banner. "Killing giraffes in Danish zoos is totally acceptable but threatening to punch a zebra is against every animal right," said an expert on punching things from the WWF. The topic was brought to fruition in a forum, where it was proposed that as only users at Uncyclopedia lack enough of a soul to laugh at zebras in gladiator arenas then the current site banner should be replaced with something that the readers and the users can both deal with and benefit from.
Already both Alcoholics Anonymous and the Samaritans were demanding that they could appeal on our site banner as according to them, "By targeting Uncyclopedian users specifically we could dramatically decrease the alcohol abuse and suicide rate across the World." These proposals were rejected by the community and admin Spike gave a press statement, "Uncyclopedia is not a home to psychopaths who have no soul, it is home to users who enjoy training zebras to box, fill up their vehicular transport with ethanol and love the sensation of running towards a cliff or a very fast train."
The Chief complained that there were no other options for the site banner. Unless he could market his new paint stripping technique manual on the banner, he saw nothing to promote that readers wanted to know. Perhaps we should do away with the banner completely as we had done before.
Does this mean that when we hold large events like PLS people will actually have to get off their lazy arses and bother to check village dump? A feat surely almost impossible considering that many users also complained they do not have the muscular capacity to click a few links and read the UnSignpost.
Uncyclopedia needed for schoolwork
In the same week that a Mr. E stole 2 million pounds from the Bank of England and, when caught, complained that the Bank of England Management worried too much about money they weren't using and put the aim of solving the economy ahead of a 2 million pound classwork project so that Mr. E could get a good grade, another Mr. E basically did the same thing on Uncyclopedia, except involving an article rather than money.
Specifically, Mr. E insisted that Uncyclopedia was not merely a humor wiki but also a free resource on which to complete unfunny classroom assignments. Uncyclopedians gave him and his classmates helpful advice to aim for a career as sports prostitutes, something Mr. E felt confident he could achieve. This was also the first recorded instance of Uncyclopedians nagging newbies, as normally it is the other way around.
Mr. E's article on a fake ideology, which he luckily screenshot moments before the admins took it down — saving his teacher from spending five days managing his anger before turning to manage his bad grammar — was requested by numerous Uncyclopedians so that they could expand it and make a mockery of the Middle East, or more likely, of Mr. E. Mr. E's sharpest criticism was that this site should make a mockery of the Middle East (or, considering his article was a fake ideology, it was disgusting that this site should make a mockery of his mockery of a Middle Eastern ideology). Unfortunately, hypocrisy was next term's topic, but we await a follow-on article on a fake hypocritical argument.
Mr. E stridently called our attention to intellectual property rights, insisting that Uncyclopedia would never get his work back as he owned it (or at least the three school-kids sharing the username shared ownership) and we didn't. And he walked off smugly, ignorant of both our CC-BY-SA-PDQ agreement and the ease with which an admin could recover his "contribution" and send it off to Wikileaks for the world to ridicule. This is perhaps a story for Uncyclopedians to quietly reflect on — or laugh at — and if it isn't too big a hint, quiet reflection is not the business of this house organ.
A Linear What?
Two of the relative technical giants in our ragtag bunch of survivors have been dabbling with Linear Gradients, a recent innovation that lets you create glitzy graphics without having to endure the warnings about gore and nudity at Special:Upload. First, Spike's signature became a tiny bit shinier, and so did the background of {{Writing funny stuff}} included in some Welcome messages to newbies. Spike packaged the stuff for retail use in {{LinearGradient}}. User:PuppyOnTheRadio went further, both in documenting that template (click on the link to read how to use it) and in ensuring that it works for Uncyclopedians whose browsers were invented back when Gradient was a draft proposal, and does something even on Netscape. Puppy one-upped Spike in the signature wars, devising a radial gradient that appears to poke drain-holes in everyone's talk page — then went viral with the technology, proposing in Forum:Construction template to apply the shininess to {{Construction}}. All Uncyclopedians will be relieved to have a new technical gimmick to distract them from the chore of thinking up original humor.
In an development that is unrelated but neatly fits in the same category (given a large-enough hammer), Spike elicited debugging help from Wikia to track down a year-old bug in the Watchgadget, a piece of code that puts a button to the left of every line in your Watchlist to take it off the list. The tool used a package (once) that an unrelated file in his userspace would go on to break for all subsequent uses. The Wikians were polite, as they always are when there are no Bare Tits showing, and the wild-goose chase ended with only one red face. The news for the general Uncyclopedian, then, is not that this gadget works, but that, after a year, it no longer claims not to work.
The 200th issue
Readers, fellow editors and everyone else who helped the UnSignpost to become the leading periodical of Uncyclopedia,
Although we have been facing many difficulties, such as the lack of time, users, articles, news, will, formatting issues, Wikia, Jimbo Wales and the 1947 Horse-Throwing Competition, we managed to overcome every single one of them (maybe apart from our laziness, though) and to establish our belo-... ahem... to establish our newspaper as the leading periodical of Uncyclopedia! We have carried on with our duty, we have delivered more spam than Uncyclopedia could have ever imagined, we have wasted everyone's time and efforts, and, more importantly, this has never resulted in a ban (until recently).
This proves many important things, for instance, that a community is most creative when it doesn't have a goal. And what is more creative for a group of people to write about the news that happened within that group for that same group to read and discuss? Or to make a website more active by having journalists, who would do anything to have any material to treat in their newspaper?
Not only is the UnSignpost team creative, it is also very open-minded. The countries from which the UnSignpost editors come range from the Land of the Highlands to the country hosting the Third Rome, and from the Eastern US to Australia! I am not even mentioning the fact that the UnSignpost surprisingly has always been influenced by Uncyclopedia, which is a real melting pot of cultures.
Pssst: John, I need the applause quick! I lost the second page of my script. Sure, I'll improvise!
If you need any further proof that UnSignpost is the best, consider that it has never bitten a dog, its editors have never gone crazy (because they always have been) and it has never given birth to a weasel! It has never wanted to do no one no harm, because it just wanted to tend the rabbits, and it still survives! It has... It has...
Actually, instead of naming all its achievements, which will certainly take me years to do, I'll simply state that...
Ladies and gentleman, my speech is over!
Unhappy Monkey
UnSignpost boycotts Votes for Highlight
On a second thought...
The left column of the UnSignpost is so much longer than the right one, that we must balance it with something. So here you go:
Top VFH nominations:
- A Bull's Life- A story of racism, prejudice and perseverance (8/0)
- William Shakespeare (7/0)
- HowTo:Correctly Install your Telescreen (6/0)
- Will Harridge (5.5/0)
Highlight of the week:
- Out Run (7/0.5)