[ANSTHRLD] College of Heralds Internal Submissions

[Andrewe Bawldwyn]

Greetings!

Some of you might be on the SCA-Heralds emailing list, and have seen
Master Istvan's announcement about OSCAR's newest capability. For
those of you who aren't acquainted with it, the SCA uses OSCAR (Online
System for Commentary and Response) to handle all it's College of Arms
level submissions processing. We've been utilizing this system for
several years now to handle our Letters of Intent and CoA commentary.
What's changing is that OSCAR will now allow us to handle our internal
letters on this system as well. In light of this change, we'll be
beginning the process of fully migrating to OSCAR for submissions. It
is expected that this change will greatly benefit submissions
processing for Ansteorra, as there are many features that will make
the life of our two submissions deputies much easier.

If anyone would like full on technical details, please contact me
off-list, and I'll be happy to provide. For the masses though, here's
a slightly watered down version of everything. I apologise for the
tl;dr-ness of this missive.

It's my ChristmaHanuKwanzikah wish that we will be able to roll out
with this as of the February 2012 ILoI, but that is certainly flexible
for sooner or later. Parts of the December 2011 ILOI are already
active, and we may be publishing parts of the January 2012 ILoI to
OSCAR to allow people to get used to OSCAR commentary but at this time
ACE will be the official medium for the December 2011 and January 2012
ILoIs. Some details are still being worked out but I wanted to make
sure to give everyone advanced notice. We will be going over this at
King's Round Table in January.

Submitters should notice no change in processing times or end-results.
Internal Letters will still be visible without OSCAR logins, and
internal commentary will be visible and public. Istvan has set each
kingdom up with an interface where there is no accidental interaction
with Laurel level items, or indeed other Kingdoms unless the user
purposely navigates off that particular kingdom interface. Therefore,
much of the OSCAR functionality should remain "invisible" to non-CoA
users.

One OSCAR login will work for any kingdom or Laurel, provided the user
is granted the proper permissions. In this case, I'm intending to have
anyone with CoA permissions as able to comment on Ansteorran letters.
All other users will be granted commentary privileges as they create
their accounts. IF you have an OSCAR account already, you need not
(and please don't) create a new one. If you're not sure, get in touch
with me and I can look at the users list to help figure that out. If
you don't have a login and you wish to comment, create one and I'll
get you approved for in-kingdom commentary.

ILoIs will continue to be published by Asterisk on the usual schedule.
He and I are working together to make as seamless a transition as
possible.

Commenters will notice a slightly different commenting interface but
nothing substantial should change. There are some finer points about
OSCAR commentary worth mentioning: A carriage-return will print one
blank line below the end of your current line:

This is some text (Carriage Return)

This is some more text.

If you want to make a single line-return, you'll need to put in the
HTML line-break code <br> --

This is some text<br>This is some text becomes:

This is some text
This is some text.

Other than that, OSCAR commentary is mostly the same as ACE.

If you have any questions, please do get in touch with me.

Andrewe
Star