I know this has nothing to do with Magic, but I'm very proud of my new audio drama, called Say Hello to Black Jack, and I want to share it with youse guys.

It's based on the award winning hard-hitting medical drama manga of the same name (Shuho Sato made his work 'Royalty Free' in 2012 meaning anyone can use it for any way they see fit.) Season one consists of five episodes, which you can listen to on iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube, or check out the website at sayhellotoblackjack.com

While polite, and by a community member...

Isn't this spam?

Maybe. I thought I'd run it up the flagpole and see.

For what it's worth, I've been dealing with this on Reddit for a number of weeks now. Every subreddit has their own rules. I can't seem to find a way to even segue this into r/Manga, even though I know many Redditors there would appreciate it. r/AudioDrama, however, is almost exclusively 'spam' like this, and it is encouraged considerably. r/Seinen, meanwhile, is in the air. There just isn't enough action there for any hard and fast rules to have been applied. I'm probably just going to take a stab there while apologizing.

We have a lot more activity here than r/Seinen (albeit with a smaller group.) But I don't think we've ever talked about straight up advertising one's own stuff. It seemed more appropriate to just do it, and see what people's reactions would be.

I do have a Magic related article series I think people would be interested in as well. But this thread doesn't seem like a good place to mention it. I only mention it here to help add to the conversation. Was my initial post welcome? If not, would it be welcome in a different 'card set'? And what about Magic-related stuff? Is self-promotion of that appropriate here/in another set?

I'd say if an article series is of specific interest to card designers, then this cardset is a fine place to link it.

Apart from that... I don't know. It's the kind of thing it'd be natural to put on user profile pages, if we had them, or even for people to include in their forum signatures, if we had them. But we don't. Forum signatures, avatars etc aren't really the kind of thing I'm interested in implementing; Multiverse isn't trying to be a freeform forum, and I'm not interested in reimplementing phpBB.

User profile pages are something I'd like to give people more control over, if only so it's clearer which cardsets are the "main" or "interesting" ones and which ones are archive or scratch or staging areas. And I'd certainly let people add hyperlinks to those, if they existed. But it wouldn't make much sense for those to turn up in Recent Changes, so it wouldn't be any use for actually drawing people's attention to stuff.

I can't think of a natural way to advertise something completely non-Magic-related on the site. But at the same time, if people who're well-established in the community (as jmgariepy certainly is) have something they're excited about, I'm not averse to them finding somewhere not too intrusive to share it, like this.

One idea: maybe we could have a convention that there's a cardset - maybe this one, Conversation - where each user can create their own card as their own space, and can put whatever they want in the thread there?

shrug I can't see any possible downside to posting this -- I am certainly interested in this sort of stuff about other multiverse regulars.

If conversation gets overwhelmed with off-topic stuff, we could split it into "magic conversation" and "other conversation" or similar.

But I don't see any advantage to worrying about it in advance. The reason for rules about "no spam" or "no advertising" is that if you don't have that, everyone tends to think everyone is interested in their pet project, and the forum is overwhelmed with that sort of thing, to the exclusion of the ostensible topic. I think, there's few enough regulars, that there's no need for particular rules.

My strong opinion is to continue posting whatever people like, and only instituting a policy if we get enough people that stops working.

And FWIW, I read your blog and enjoy your writing, but it just happens I don't easily absorb videos or podcasts, so I haven't seen a lot of your interesting output.

Thanks Jack! I totally get skipping the podcast stuff when hitting my blog. If it was me, I'd probably skip those entries as well. If I go to a blog, I'm probably there to read words. I go to the iTunes store if I want to hear a podcast. It's just the way it works.

@Alex: I like the idea of constantly updating the same card. A number of Facebook groups do the same thing, asking you to post new episodes to your show to an old chain, thus pushing it to the top, but also not creating a pile of comment threads (FWIW, I'm not posting here for each individual episode. I know this isn't the place for that. I might try making a post for each season, however.)

It does feel a little less intuitive on Multiverse, though. On Facebook, a conversation chain is compressed to only the most recent comments. Multiverse comes with a giant pile of text. It would make more sense if the site automatically scrolled down to the bottom of the conversation, but we don't do that here... for good reason. When evaluating comments on cards, we want people to acknowledge the previous comments, even if they don't read them, rather than unconsciously nudge them to only read the last couple of comments and ignore the rest.

Either way, I'm happy to comply with that plan if that's what you prefer. At the very least, we can use it as a test ground. A week from now, I'll talk about the more Magic-y project on my blog on this card, and we'll see how people feel about creating an ever expanding conversation on one card.

Oh, and as an alternate idea: Is there any way to make the comments scroll down to the bottom on just one card? Could we make a card titled "Self-Promotion" and force anyone who wanted to promote their stuff to use that card, which always scrolled down to the latest entry? And is that even a good idea? Would creating a card like that just encourage 'the wrong type of people' to take advantage of it?

It may be a mobile thing, or because I'm following the link from the recent changes page, but I do in fact get jumped to the last comment.

Edit: here's the permalink to this comment that I'm directed to. http://www.magicmultiverse.net/cards/78578#comment_82494

Huh weird. So did I this time. But when I tested using Red Commons Submissions from the old community set, I was sent to the top. Still do.

http://www.magicmultiverse.net/cards/10672

In the Recent Changes view, when a log entry is "someone commented on [a card]", the link from [a card] will be to that specific comment. But if the log entry is "someone edited [a card]" then the link is just to the top of the card's page.

So this partly fills your request automatically. If there's a card (like this one) whose actual card text is irrelevant and is just used as a discussion thread, then each hyperlink to it from the recent changes views will jump to the bottom.