Move from World Almanac to Mechanics

[Happydevil43]

Hi Guys,

Is there a simple way (aka not having to copy, paste, delete, rinse and repeat) to move topics from the world almanac to the mechanics reference.

In my early days of inputting data I put a whole heap of monsters, treasures etc in the world almanac but thinking that they probably should be in the mechanics reference, so I would like to move them to tidy up my realm a bit.

Cheers

[tkarn]

I think this is not possible.

[daplunk]

There was a way... not sure if it still works... never did it myself.

It involved changing the categories of the article somehow and it flipped it from one section to the next.

[kbs666]

It is possible.

http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost.php?p=236997&postcount=5

[Bidmaron]

Search for posts by rob in mid-late 2016

[tkarn]

It is possible.

http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost.php?p=236997&postcount=5

Ah, OK.
Thank you. Didn't know that.

[rob]

Thanks, @kbs666!

[GThiel]

Rob, could you give us a "simple" explanation on why it is so difficult to move something from the World Almanac to Mechanics Reference? (As a programmer, I know I really hated it when I was asked to explain "Why cant I do that SIMPLE thing?")

[rob]

The reason is an intentional design decision and not technical.

The distinction between story and mechanics is at a fundamental level in our view of things. Moving something around between different story-focused categories is easy. Moving something around between different mechanics-focused categories is easy. Moving between the two is intentionally "just not done", since making it easy would blur the distinction and encourage users to be cavalier in keeping the two separate.

It's similar to the way that APIs are often designed with intentional barriers between certain aspects to avoid confusion, conflation, or abuse. Or the notion of Chinese Walls in business environments.

Hope this helps!

[ri_gamer]

I'm having trouble with step 3. Change the user-created category from topic to article, or vice versa. I can't seem to be able to figure out how to change the new user-created category to a topic from an article.

[rob]

Go to the Options/Tools menu at the top right (hammer & crescent wrench icon)
Click the Move To menu option
Click the Mechanics Articles sub-option

[Bidmaron]

There are some fairly common subtleties though that represent valid circumstances when you might want to do this. One example:

I wanted to add native tongue and languages known to creatures. So far, so good, but then it occurred to me that "Common" is not a world thing, it is a rules thing. Not having seen your move technique, and since it was only one item, it was easy to move (I deleted and re-added, which caused linkage problems). But the point is that it is really not that unusual that a category of topics has elements that are rules and elements that are world/realm-specific. Experienced RW users will already know these, but new users will stumble into these as they begin to gel the way they want to represent their world.

While the number of entries concerned will (hopefully) be low, I think it may be a source of frustration to new users and somewhat off-putting that something that seems simple is so very hard, and few users will appreciate the rationale behind intentionally making it hard.

Not a bitch, just a consideration....

[kbs666]

TBH, the arbitrary topic/article barrier is annoying and has been a problem in refactoring my realms in the past. I'm sure it is a source of frustration for newer users on a regular basis.

[ri_gamer]

Sorry Rob, that may work for Topic to Article, but not for Article to Topic . I select Move To Story/World Topic Categories and I get attached error.

Thanks for the help anyway.

-Ray

[Parody]

Make sure any Topics/Articles using the Category you're attempting to move are not Contained and have no Contained objects. Containment is visible in the hierarchy of the Navigation Pane on the left (if enabled) or in the "Containing Objects" section of the Relationships Pane on the right.

I was able to move a Category both ways in my quick test, FWIW.

[ri_gamer]

Bingo! Thanks.

[rob]

As @ri_gamer encountered, there are definitely some technical tendrils that complicate things. So it's not a matter of just trivially removing this distinction.

If any topic/article belonging to the category is contained or has children, those need to be broken to migrate the category and all its derived topics/articles across. Then comes the question of how to best accomplish that. We could force the user to deal with it, but if we're "making it easy" then users will expect us to automate it. At that point, I'm not sure how best to tear apart what the user has put into place and can't be retained in a way that the user will consider friendly. That's something we'd have to solve, so changing this behavior would have some unpleasant complexities and isn't something we can do expediently.

[Bidmaron]

I think it is a very low priority fix, maybe a never fix. I would just hesitate to say that you made it intentionally hard, as it sounds like it was a design decision that had consequences you didn't intentionally insert just to make it hard.

I really don't think a user will make this mistake that often once they get through the experimenting stage of realm creation.

[ri_gamer]

My change was the result of too much rethinking after the 5E structures were released. Hopefully not a common occurrence, also I think it will be a lesser issue when users can see how content from the market has been structured.