AnalAnarchy has deleted the original group because the illuminati told him to. Please direct your butthurt here instead of at his page, because he is currently in deprogramming therapy and was not entirely responsible for his actions.

And to ease the pain of everyone's butts even more, the Wayback Machine has a copy of the group from 6 months ago that looks like it's got most everything in it. We can rebuild. Bigger and better than ever before. :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130617055006/http://www.fimfiction.net/group/197726/x-becomes-a-changeling

2976798

I just looked at the groups page to find this, no biggie. I pity whoever has to regroup all the fics that were scattered in the dust, I guess?

2976823

Look up fgt

2976815
Have a Brohoof.
/)*(\

2976815 Alright, it's not all that there was on deletion, but I'm currently transferring it into OpenOffice.

They shall not be lost!

2976823 Hrmph. Parasprite just surprise admined me, so I guess I'm on the cleanup crew.

I learned a valuable lesson: never let anyone know that you could be useful for anything. :)

2976846

I see the sky

2976862

Until that comment suddenly popped into existence above mine, I figured someone would have to find everything again. Now it's elbow grease-tier stuff. Still, uh, felicitaciones on being a new admin. That's record time, or something!

2976899 A new academy record!

I'm a Wikipedia editor, elbow grease doesn't scare me. :)

Alright! I got all the stories from the 6-months-ago archive into an OpenOffice Document and organized them by folder. The ones with more than one page have some missing since it 'has no record' for page 2 of any given folder.

Folders were as follows:

Main
Adventure
AJ
Background
Clop
Cream of the Crop
Dark
Fluttershy
HiE
Mane 6
Other
Pinkie
Queen
Rainbow
Rarity
Twilight Sparkle
Who Is It?
Will Become(Verified Stories Only)

Once the folders have been made, I will go on an adding spree right away, sleep permitting.

That thread deletion was the most pointless waste of time ever to grace fimfiction.

I don't mean to insult human beings, but some human beings who exist these days have such illogical minds.

2976798 Who... is illuminati and why the hell did he tell anarchy to delete the group?

2977767
While it is convenient to blame us, the Illuminated Ones had nothing to do with the deletion of the group.

If AnalAnarchy is undergoing deprogramming therapy (For being gay? For not being a good Christian? For not being a good Republican?) he has my pity... and also derision.

2978103 How about for not being a good person?

2978119
Well, given the nature of deprogramming, it isn't really done for GOOD reasons.

Though I suppose one could view institutionalization as sort of deprogramming, it isn't really the same thing.

2977128 I'm starting to create the folders, but I've never managed a group before and the interface is behaving nonintuitively. Give me a few minutes to figure out what the heck I'm doing. :)

Edit: Okay, I think I've figured out how this is working.

Lets do this.

Alrighty, I've created all of the previous folders except for the "Cream of the Crop" folder. I don't know what the old criteria were for including stories in there, but I figured this might be a good opportunity to discuss what criteria we want to have for determining what the best of the best is. For example, we could make it something nice and objective like "Anything that's Complete and has X number of likes", with X adjusted so that there isn't a huge number of stories that make it in there.

Any ideas or preferences?

I don't know, but I do have a list of the ones that were there so what was good for the last one...

Also, what about Dark and Who Is It?

Ack. missed those. I was working from my own copies of the folders from the Wayback Machine and they saved differently from the rest. Adding now.

2978935 Alright, we can prepopulate Cream of the Crop with what was there before. But once everything's settled back down I'll go through them and see if it looks like we should revisit that category a bit.

Alright, I've done all I can. Probably missed quite a few, but it's safe to say we now have the majority down.

2979235
2979096
Are we filtering stuff at all as we re-add it, or are we just trying to re-add everything we had before?

2979473 Up until now it was a giant dump of everything we could back into the old folders they were in in the previous group.

I'm now starting to go through my local Calibre fanfic archive, which has stories labeled by group but not by folder-within-group, and I'm starting to find X Becomes A Changeling stories that aren't immediately obvious where they belong. I'm tossing those into Main right now, I'll go through them and sort them further later on.

2979510
Makes sense. I'll try and go through the main folder stuff and sort it as you put stuff in.

Question for both of you, so tagging 2979235 as well:

Right now we have a "other" folder (which seems to be "everyone not listed") and a background pony folder (which is... the background ponies). Do we want a separate folder for any other sets of characters? The CMC? The princesses (either a folder for all of them, or one for each of Celestia/Luna/Cadance, though I'm not sure how many such stories there are)?

Just a thought as I was looking.

2979661 I guess once a folder gets larger than one page it might be worth looking into splitting it up into subfolders. Alas, we're not going to have that problem much right now since the Wayback Machine pruned off the second page of the two or three folders that were large enough for that in the previous group. Though hopefully I'll find enough in my local archive to make it a problem. :)

2979739
I just went ahead and made a Cutie Mark Crusaders folder and a Princesses folder, as both of those have more stories than, say, Applejack does.

2979924 Poor Applejack, can't catch a break.

And that's that, I've added all the stories I had downloaded that were marked as being in "X Becomes A Changeling." Between that and the Wayback Machine I think we've gathered as much as we can.

Not bad! Looks like we're only 50 stories short of what was in the previous group. Now it's just a matter of a little sorting and tidying.

I moved around some stuff; took some stuff out of the main folder and stuck it where it belonged, moved some stuff out of the other folder into places they belonged too, and as mentioned previously made the Princesses and CMC folders and populated them with what I could find quickly.

There's still some stories in Main that I haven't been through yet, though.

2978103 I was under the assumption the illuminati was a username, so no I was not deriding you.

If you were being sarcastic about the church, I really don't appreciate that, but I guess you have your own views, and I'm used to that, so meh.

I honestly think if Anarchy was truly undergoing some difficulties, then there's really nothing I can blame him for so I will withdraw any complaints I had earlier.