The Philosophy of the Editing Process:

Our goal is to make the episodes uniform in appearance, free of spelling and typing errors, and generally easy to read. Our goal is to not to alter the content or interfere with other players' intentions.

The Stages of the Editing Process:

1. Raw Logs
2. Manual Edit (this is the step done mainly by volunteers)
3. Final Edit

1. Raw Logs:

Logs start out as plain-text files generated by the Egads! robot (@egads) that lives in #naros. They are referred to as "raw" logs while in this form. They contain a lot of extraneous information such as pre-game chitchat. These are held onto for archival purposes but not made available to the general public. The most recent raw logs (for episodes not posted yet) can be accessed via the game log search engine, but a username and password is required to read them. In some cases, particularly with older gaming sessions, the raw logs have been generated by players' IRC clients instead of Egads!.

2. Manual Edit:

Variously referred to as pre-editing or rough editing, this step involves the careful reading and manual editing of the log by a human being. The step is intended to take the strain off the final edit stage by dealing with time-consuming basic legibility and grammatical checks.

The human editors perform a very specific set of edits as follows.

Editor Checklist:

1. Eliminate hard carriage returns where they don't belong in the middle of people's posts.
2. Decipher incomprehensible sentences. If at any time a sentence is completely botched so as to make the player's intentions a mystery, the editor may have to actually write to the player and ask them what they were trying to say. Then a legible version is constructed. This is rare, but it does occasionally happen. If the player cannot be contacted, the sentence is left as-is for the reader to attempt to interpret.
3. Fill or identify missing sections. The most obvious signs of missing pieces of log are IRC out-and-in messages showing that Egads! was temporarily kicked off, or else obvious leaps in the story line or dialog indicating something might be missing. If an editor does not keep their own logs or their log is missing that part too, then it is time to write the players asking for somebody to volunteer the missing piece. The editor specifies the date of the session in question, as well as the beginning and ending lines of the section wanted. If the section cannot be located, a note is made as to where the gap is and what the editor thinks happened during it.
4. Erase all IRC messages including name changes, entries/exits, and mode changes.
5. Eliminate per-line indents and time codes.
6. Correct game punctuation. In cases where square brackets or tildes have been forgotten or messed up, the problem is corrected. This is done in such a way that the person's original intent remains unobscured. As a reminder: Actions performed during speech should be [in square brackets] and speech performed during actions should be "in quotes". Nageric actions should be ~~in tildes~~.
7. Correct English (and Simelan) punctuation, spacing and capitalization, except in cases where the player's intentions would be compromised. Care is taken when inserting commas and the like, as it is possible to change the meaning of a sentence this way.
8. Correct spelling including Simelan words. This is done using a spell checker, but very carefully. A lot of word substitutions can be introduced by not paying attention at this stage. Also: when entering the Simelan words into a virgin dictionary it is important to make sure that they are spelled correctly. For unfamiliar English words, the Merriam-Webster site is helpful. If a word that isn't a real word is used, it is usually allowed to slide.
9. Correct appearance of character names. It has become the convention to correct, at the beginning of lines, all character names that may have been altered due to IRC limitations. This may involve changes to the spelling, capitalization, punctuation or spacing. As examples, Richard` becomes Richard, BrielC becomes Briel, wisesnake becomes Wise Snake, and DeliveryB becomes Delivery Boy.
10. Correct punctuation at head of lines. It has become standard that actions will have no punctuation after the name, while dialog will have a colon after the name. Neither actions nor dialog should have anything before the name.
11. Eliminate word substitutions. These are rampant, particularly in older logs. There is absolutely no way to find them but to read carefully through the log, line by line, understanding what the players' intents were, and correcting any substituted words. It takes considerable practice to become really thorough at this.
12. Tweak the line order if necessary. This is a very tricky process as the nature of a scene can be changed considerably by the erroneous switching of two lines. It is also possible to lose lines completely by screwing up with keystroke shortcuts. When in doubt, lines are left in their original order til the final edit stage.
13. Optional: quotable quotes nominations. Editors stay on the lookout for nominees for the quotable quotes page, particularly those which will be absent in the edited log (typos, word substitutions, etc.). Nominations are copied-and-pasted to the bottom of the log with a small note saying it's for a quotable quote.
14. Optional: suggested footnotes. If editors have any suggestions for footnotes, they are put at the bottom of the log with a small note specifying which lines they are for. The most valuable footnotes are those which give information that was either behind-the-scenes or from so far back in the episodes it is possible the reader hasn't read the required background information.

Slow but steady wins the race. It is better to receive fewer edited logs, more accurately edited, than a lot of ones that have to be re-edited heavily during the final edit stage. The following plan of attack seems to be reasonably efficient: (There used to be more steps than this, but Egads! eliminated some of them.)

1. Read through once, slowly, line-by-line, correcting all errors and line-order problems you see.
2. Run a spell check when finished, being careful not to cause any word substitution errors.

Editors rename the rough-edited logs to their original name minus the -Egads!; for example, 991215.html. The logs are returned via FTP.

Final Edit:

During this stage, the rough-edited episodes are carefully re-read and spellchecked one final time. Anything that got missed the first go-round is corrected. Notes, if any, are added. In the rare cases where content censorship is required, it happens during this stage. Then, the episode receives a title and a description and is added to one or more of the scenario episode indexes.

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