So. This year, on average, has sucked. I won’t go into the details but suffice to say I didn’t get much progress made on HM projects in January and February and I was pretty badly burned out through most of March. I only really shook that off last week.

But spring has sprung and the stars have aligned and I'm back at it.

Now Hiring

The first order of business is that I, like everyone else on the Council, am hiring magistrates. If you're not talented enough to work for the Herald and you hate talking to strangers too much to work for the Fist, you may have a bright future as M:HM.

The job has two primary duties:

• Along with Alaris and I, ensure that all the exams that aren't autograded are processed within 24 hours of submission (except for the Test of Wisdom). This isn't a particularly time consuming task, especially divided between five-six people.

• Write new courses. This actually is pretty time consuming. We'll talk through what you'll be working on individually, but there are subject areas where I need help and ones where I really don't. This is going to be the primary factor in our hiring decisions.

Additionally, there's opportunities to assist with the Wiki and with trivia, although these are supplemental duties and shouldn't be done at the expense of the primary two.

As for the courses we need:

• Leadership is in dire need of an overhaul. This is the top priority. I think it'll also be the hardest to hire for, but honestly, if I get three good candidates for this I'm not ruling out dedicating all three positions to it. It's that important.

• We need courses on the four DB factions.

• We need to expand our offerings for what I call “cooperative writing.” That's RP, run-ons, small group/co-op fiction and, (as Iddy gets things set up), ACC.

• I'll be working with Malfearak to develop art content, but I'm open to a joint appointment or to hire somebody for this.

I'm not setting any hard requirements on rank, other positions, etc. but those will factor into the decision. So if you've already got five jobs or you have ten minutes of DB time per week or you joined the club two days ago or you can't get through a conversation about the weather with me or Alaris without cussing us out, feel free to apply. Just be realistic about your suitability for the position, particularly whether this is work you want to do and if you're really able to do it.

How to Apply

Get your application to me no later than April 24.

The primary job duty is helping people navigate our systems, lore, and activities. So your application needs to show me you can do that. I don't need a resume or plans or references. I need you to send me and Alaris an email. Either in the email body or an attachment, pick a concept you think the SA doesn’t explain or doesn't explain well, and give me something better. If you can do it in a few paragraphs, that's fine—you don't have to write a full course and can tackle something more specific or focused. If you want to go longer, you can, just remember this is an application so don't be heartbroken if it never sees the light of day. If you have any other questions, ask me.

Shout Outs

Q1 has come and gone, so everyone congratulate our top three decathletes: Majyc, Saal Kesyk, and Vincent Brujah. All three of them did over 50 SA courses in three months and clocked in at more than 100 ACs each. Additionally, congratulations to March’s winner, Ahathr’iss’asapla (Thrissa), who clawed their way up to 4th place in the quarterly competition in three days.

On the wiki front, we’ve got our honorees for March and April.

March’s Featured Article was Kasiya, a lovely guide to Taldryan’s homeworld. This month, we’re spotlighting the Envoy Corps.

Our Wikipedian of the Month for March was Marick Tyris Arconae. Although Wally was a good choice by the traditional standard of making improvements to articles that aren’t your own, what really impressed me was how he made the time to sit down with another member in voice chat and walk her through setting up articles for her characters. That’s a rare level of devotion to our community and it deserves the spotlight.

This month’s WOTM is our Voice, Idris Adenn. Iddy and the Voice staff have stayed on top of the huge amount of CS system documentation for a while now, but what pushed him above and beyond was his effort last month to proactively revisit and freshen up the fictional roles of his Council colleagues and transfer that knowledge to the Wiki.

As a reminder, anyone can nominate a Featured Article, so please put any good ones you’ve made or seen into the pile for a future Dark Side Scroll.

Shadow Academy Status Updates

As mentioned at the top of the report, we haven't been making much progress since the beginning of the year. Or rather, I haven't; I have several drafts in various stages of editing. Fortunately, I think that means my next report will include a few new courses and a new degree, but this month is pretty quiet.

However, Alaris did get through a revision and automation sweep of the Legends courses. Those are live as of this writing. As always, if you find any hiccoughs with the notes or exams, please let us know through the form or directly.

Status Update: Wiki

He’s some fun facts about the wiki:

• We have 4,000ish “content” pages.
• If you include all the redirects, templates, categories, etc. then that number jumps to over 18,000 pages.
• We have about 7,500 images.

That’s a lot. And when it’s legitimate content, that’s great. We love content. But size is a double edged sword, because the more stuff we have on the wiki, the harder it is to find what you’re looking for, and the more we have to manage and update. So there’s a few things we’re going to be doing in the coming months to tackle this.

Images: Some of you may have gotten auto-emails from the wiki about this already. We have well over 400 images on the wiki that aren’t actually used by the wiki. Now, some of this is really cool stuff, commissioned character art or things of historical interest. But most of it is not: old screenshots from Fist documentation, the same picture with three different levels of cropping, an MS Paint drawing from 2007, etc. I can’t always tell the difference. So what I’m doing is going through and hitting all of them with the {{Deletion}} template.

What’s that mean for you? Anything Flagged for Deletion will sit there for at least a month. If you don’t want it deleted, stick it in an article. If you need help with that, contact me and/or Bentre. If it’s not in an article by May and nobody’s bugged me about it, I will assume it’s clutter and the burnination will begin.

Categories: Ideally, you should be able to start at Contents and be able to browse through whatever articles you’re interested in. That’s… not exactly how it works in practice. For example, there were over a hundred categories in the parent Image Categories. Some places are locations, others are territories, some are both. Ditto for animals: are they under Creatures or Flora and Fauna? Both? Neither? And don’t get me started on DJB Help vs DJB Info. So that’s something I’ve started to clean up a bit. For the most part, this won’t impact you or your articles, but hopefully it’ll help make the wiki less labyrinthine until we get a better frontpage set up.

Policies and Reference: I’m also starting to go through all our various policies and documentations to flag the things that haven’t been touched in a decade—Howie—and also to think about if things are being presented in a way that makes sense. So, for example, we have Ranks. Then we have a page for each tier. And then we have a separate page for every rank. We even have a page for Old Ranks. But those don’t list the XP required for promotion anywhere, so you need to go look at the XP Policy. What does your next promotion get you? Uh, you can check the CS Guide. And also the Herald Policies. Or you can look at the page Iddy started on Perks per Rank. So yeah, I think we can maybe cut down on that a little bit.

The Character Template: Lastly, just a little PSA on ye olde {{Character |type=. That has to be an Order, i.e. Sith, Force Disciple, Jedi, Loyalist, or Mercenary, or “NPC.” Changing it to something unique doesn’t accomplish anything besides breaking the color coding and dumping your character article on the naughty list that is Category:Character Needs Type. That field doesn’t display anything in the template, it’s only used by the Wiki to color code your character info box and categorize your character by order. Maybe one day I’ll change the template to show “order” instead of “type,” but in the meantime I’ll just troubleshoot this when it comes up.

But generally speaking, I’m interested in any and all ways to make the wiki more pleasant and easy to navigate. If you’ve got an idea for how to improve things, maybe a neat template you’d like to have, please let me and Bentre know.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or archenksov on Discord.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Comms 103: DJBWiki (An Introduction)
- Updated current year (Benin)
Comms 101: Website Navigations
- Updated the course to reflect current website navigation (Benin)
- Added Activities navigation
- Removed Gaming navigation
- Updated Answer Keys

COMBAT & WARFARE
ACC Combat Studies
- Clarified the information on the demo match used in the exam.

LEGENDS
Guardian Legends
- Removed a typo in the exam. (Zuza)
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Sith Legends
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Obelisk Legends
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Krath Legends
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
- Fixed a technical glitch making question 3 unanswerable (Ahathr’iss’asapla)
Sentinel Legends
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Consular Legends
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Legends Galactic History 101: Formation of the Galaxy
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded.
Legends Galactic History 102: Origins of the Jedi Order
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded.
Legends Galactic History 103: The Ascension of the Sith Empire
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded.
Legends Galactic History 104: The Great Sith War
-Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded.
Legends Galactic History 105: Saga of Revan and Malak
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Legends Galactic History 106: Wars of the Force
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Legends Galactic History 107: Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded
Legends Galactic History 108: Trials of the New Republic
- Added wrong answer hints and made fully autograded

LORE
Alchemy Studies
- Improved exam question formatting (Ahathr’iss’asapla)
Galactic Languages
- Improved exam question formatting (Ahathr’iss’asapla)

WRITING
Descriptive Writing
- Removed a link to a former SA course. (Sagitta)