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Will Plotterati ever produce printable certificates?

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(@creativitytheemotion)
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Joined: 11 months ago
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Certificates, at least to me, were a definitive part of the NaNoWriMo experience, and I see an opportunity for different text on the gold/silver awards Plotterati plans to hand out.

That being said, I can imagine that having different themes each Plot Month (a necessity for certificates that look different from month to month) might get tiring, and verification might be problematic, especially in the age of AI.


   
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(@unoriginality)
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So! Assuming Plotterati ever implements a verification system beyond "we take the writer's word for it when they plug in their word count," I recall, way back before the AI thing even became a visible terror, there was talk among NaNoers about people not wanting to upload their intact works for verification. This wasn't because of fear of AI, this was because of a very real problem with "your work exists already online, a publisher is going to be difficult to work with now," though I don't know the details of this problem. Some writers just felt that even though NaNo insisted up and down that the work itself was not saved, they'd rather play it safe than sorry.

 

So while I don't remember the names of any of these programs, or even if they still exist, there were a number of free programs- that you install on your computer, so everything's completely offline, no chance of AI getting its grubby paws on it -that will 'scramble' the text of your work. It won't change the word count, but it will take each word and change out all the letters with a random mess of other letters. So "housing" could become "xtlwocr," something that AI won't be able to use, but something that only looks for "[set of letters]" and "[other set of letters]" will recognize as a distinct word.

 

One of those programs might be useful even if Plotterati doesn't officially use a verification system themselves, if you want the help verifying the word count yourself on another site that offers the service before you self-report your word count.


   
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(@jasmine)
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@creativitytheemotion - We DO have printable certificates!  Designed last week!  We were going to announce them closer to November! A new one will be produced for each event, revealed just before hand, and then available at the end.

@unoriginality - Verification does present a problem, especially because while the challenge is, in standard form, 50K words, we also acknowledge that, for any number of reasons, people may have other goals - and those goals are valid, achieving them still matters.  And yeah, people don't want to post their work. It's something our tech expert and the rest of the board is working on, but most likely we're just going to stick to an honor system, at least for the foreseeable future. If you achieve your goal, you've won, you've succeeded, and you deserve to be celebrated.  Plus, people write in SO many different forms - Word, Scrivener, typewriter, by hand...it makes things really difficult.  

But now that you mention it, I'm going to add to our tech to-do list finding a way to keep AI from reading/scanning various parts of the site - forums, the social media/user system, etc.  Don't want people to feel like they can't share a passage for feedback without it getting found by AI!

1727199282-Plotterati-2024-Certficate.png

   
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(@unoriginality)
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@jasmine I wasn't going to assume if you ever would or not; I personally prefer the honor system, partly because a verification system often led to problems at the other place before they wised up and switched to honor system. It often disagreed with my programs and said that I wrote less than I actually did, forcing me to pound out a bunch of nonsense to make it agree with the real word count, but the main problem was that it could take the site down, and when you had a ton of writers trying to verify their word count in the last couple days, or even the last couple hours, of the event, and the system wouldn't count them as a winner if they weren't verified by midnight their time, if the site lagged and wouldn't process their document upload in time, they'd get kinda... screwed. It was so incredibly unfair. The honor system is just a better one in general.

 

And as you said, we may have different personal goals.

 

But the mention of verification made me remember those programs, so I thought I'd mention them. They could be useful elsewhere too. 🙂


   
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