Community Profile

This community is run by the Bob Stapledon Society because - as you know, Bob - a Stapledon is, according to the Turkey City Lexicon, a character whose task is to show up, provide crucial information in lecture form, and then leave (or die).

We hate Bob Stapledon in fiction, but we like him (and his sister Roberta) just fine around here.

Have you suffered for your art lately? Let us suffer along with you! We want to know all about all the cool stuff you found researching your latest piece of fiction, especially the stuff that didn't get used in the end because the subplot it was going to support got dropped.

We want your (research-related) linkspam. We want your essays, whether academic, discursive, or just plain silly. We even want your IM logs, if they constitute an infodump on some topic and they have been formatted for readability.

Go ahead, be random. Everything is on-topic, as long as it involves you telling us stuff about stuff you have learned. ANY research leftovers are allowable. This is meant to be a grab-bag community. If someone needed to learn fifteen bread recipes and twelve roses that are hardy in Zone 5 to write a book about a baker who falls in love with a gardener, we want to know about it. And, yes, you can infodump cool stuff you learned as a result of research for academic work or a non fiction piece of writing, if you want to.

Requests for research help, excerpts from your WIP - unless it's the infodump you just edited out - and muttering about how the writing is going are NOT on topic as posts, though they are permitted in comments.

Membership is open.

Posts are moderated, but only a) to ensure that they actually ARE infodumps and not community promos, self-promos, etc, b) that they do not contain the phrase "feel free to delete this post if it's not allowed", and c) that they are not, in the opinion of the mod, offensive in whole or in part or screeds dressed up as infodumps.

The mod's standards for offensiveness permit almost unlimited frank discussion of sex, bodies, and medical stuff but come down like a ton of bricks on the least suggestion of hate speech, btw. Said standards will also be applied to comments, and unpleasant behaviour in comments will get you banned very rapidly.

The mod declines to fact check infodumps or make any determination about their quality, readability, punctuation, accuracy, suitability for use, or interestingness, and will in fact let anything through which meets the above standards. You have been warned. Comments about how a post is not relevant to your interests will not be met with pleasure and amusement.

Linking to infodumps found in other places is permitted, so long as said posts are public. Please be selective. Posts of links will be evaluated as if the linked material itself had been submitted for posting. As one unsuitable link will thus stop the whole post from passing moderation, it is recommended - but not required - that only one or two link per post be offered.

Comments are to be left enabled on all posts. You are not required to answer comments or followup questions, but you are required to allow discussion among community members. Posting locked is permitted.

Self-promotion is permitted in infodump posts but not in posts of links; if you don't bring us something you made, we won't help you sell your stuff.

Self-promotion is to be limited to one link pointing to either the piece of fiction which prompted the research being infodumped or a means of buying/procuring it, one link to one's homepage, and four lines of text.

The Great Big Post Of Tags is here. Please suggest any additional tags that occur to you.