Preppers Encyclopedia

Hi Paul,
Saw your post on an audiobook of the Willow Feeder, not in my interest currently. Although pictures you already posted makes it seem pretty obvious. (Armchair expert)
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I recently was listening to a sci-fi audiobook, I think it was Dennis E Taylor's "Outland". Anyway the jist of the book is a volcano erupts, I believe Yellowstone is near you, right?
The world is thrown into chaos and country turns against country.
And somewhere in the chaos is a group that has managed to find away to an alternate universe where the volcano has already erupted. So no fear of a repeat, but technology is maybe going to take a preindustrial age nosedive.
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It made me think of permies and your forums and having a hard copy of the information your site is flooded with.
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I don't know how you could condense millions of pages, but maybe a little this. A little that.
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The author's characters face some of the people you mentioned in groups living together, but some not pulling their weight...
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It would be great to have a copy sitting on our shelves if the shtf.

I read outland and the sequel (earthside).

Physical copy ...  what would that be?  

There are ready made programs that will take an entire forum site like this one and download a full copy of it for you. That part is a piece of cake.

However i encourage you to ask paul for a download instead. Far more respectful of his bandwidth payments.

However its hard to organize a book in a mirror of a website. You could i suppose print each forum as its own chapter, and use AI or keyword software to organize each thread with the others that are similar to it. That part could be a major challenge.

This database has lasting value. And as we all know, online sites and forums vanish --poof!

It would be interesting to know if a "big snapshot" of this forum could be downloaded and converted to something offline that we humble peasants could read.

EDIT: Late to the party, but the concept is sound.

if you're ok reading it digitally, the snapshot option is a piece of cake. Which one of us wants to send paul a purple moosage asking for a snapshot?

Well I'm sure the tools exist for a full snapshot.

Asking permission is nice, remarkably old school.

The question is, what's in it for Paul?

Low Tech Magazine publishes their articles in books. But they are a magazine with articles, not a forum with pages of discussion.

Hey, Paul took his articles from Richsoil.com and from his pseudo blog on the forum, polished them up, and then published them in Building a Better World in Your Backyard . That has a ton of information for preppers.

Jeremy,
Thank you for the advice.
I bought the digital copy to check out.
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Paul,
I don't know what I would want, but if something happens and we no longer have Internet, it would be great to have the information in your forums to draw from.
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You said you read the books, I imagine the audiobooks are an exact copy of the content of them. I know years ago I read "The Running Man" and felt I enjoyed it more than the movie.
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The reason I even suggested something is the toilet thing wasn't in my want bucket. And I did think of you and your site when listening to the book.
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Maybe, like Mother Earth News, an analog/physical copy of "the flavor or subject of the month" might be enjoyed by many of us. Permies magazine has a nice ring to it. A Kickstarter with a minimal number of subscriptions offered would lend itself to helping you raise cash for whatever. It sure seems like it might lend itself to all sorts of levels. And for those that like a digital copy, you could have that as minimum contribution.
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I wonder if you offered various pages for the token ads as in traditional magazines, if you might increase your followers by using the host/beneficiary arrangement. (Separately I have thought it would be great as a membership drive for all your followers to give the permies link to friends and family.) I know, "Mike, who have you invited?" There's been a few...
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Let me take a try ...

Maybe we have a volume called "growies".  We could have AI go through and pick the best 70% of threads.  And then pick the best 70% of each of those threads.  And then have a bare bones way of presenting the discussion on pages.  And that volume would be really big.  So it might be something like $70 that could be set up at ingram spark.  My guess is that about 7 people would buy it.  

Like that?

Maybe if the number of people that buy it ever gets to, say, 50, then we could do another book that is "critters" etc.  

??

The Permies Forum is such a living document, it changes every day with new material. Each thread is a magazine article essentially.
Compare 30 days of threads on Permies Forums to any newsstand offering. The variety and quantity of material is of no comparison.
 Small bites of looking at one month and cherry picking threads, creating a magazine article from those selected threads might be easier than creating an encyclopedia. But next month there will be an addition of thread material that has merit.
I don't see an encyclopedia consisting of conversational snippets that compromise a thread. I do enjoy the snippets that occur though. So maybe not an online magazine that requires editing and an author, or collator of information. not an encyclopedia that would require the same.
So maybe Growies a best of that thread, identified and downloadable. One wouldn't have to search for the best of on their own, updateable yearly, a subscription perhaps, selectable dependent on interest.

paul wheaton wrote:Let me take a try ...

Maybe we have a volume called "growies".  We could have AI go through and pick the best 70% of threads.  And then pick the best 70% of each of those threads.  And then have a bare bones way of presenting the discussion on pages.  And that volume would be really big.  So it might be something like $70 that could be set up at ingram spark.  My guess is that about 7 people would buy it.  

Like that?

Maybe if the number of people that buy it ever gets to, say, 50, then we could do another book that is "critters" etc.  

??

I think it could work but I'd suggest as a tweak that you list the threads that will go into it about a month in advance. I suspect if commenters knew that it was going to be archived and highlighted, people might take extra time to dump extra knowledge on that topic.

I know I would.

I wanted a current printed copy of campgrounds in Texas though all the books written that I could find were from 2003 and 2009 so very outdated.

I suggested to dear hubby that we write our own book by printing out what we found on the internet.

I don't think he understood what I was taking about.

My concept is similar to what is being discussed on this thread.

Just pick your favorite threads on prepping, print them out and staple down the side and now you have a "book".

Or even better, write a book using the information found here on the forum, and have a publishing company print the book and make some money.

Daniel Andy wrote:

I think it could work but I'd suggest as a tweak that you list the threads that will go into it about a month in advance. I suspect if commenters knew that it was going to be archived and highlighted, people might take extra time to dump extra knowledge on that topic.

I know I would.

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Right after I ended my last reply, I too thought "if subscriber's voted on what they were interested in, it might make for an interesting product." Maybe like the penny voting method.
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Paul sees all the good, bad and the ugly of his creation versus my rose-colored glasses version. Sorry for not bringing hope to you Paul. I did have best intentions though.

Anne Miller wrote:I wanted a current printed copy of campgrounds in Texas though all the books written that I could find were from 2003 and 2009 so very outdated.

I suggested to dear hubby that we write our own book by printing out what we found on the internet.

I don't think he understood what I was taking about.

My concept is similar to what is being discussed on this thread.

Just pick your favorite threads on prepping, print them out and staple down the side and now you have a "book".

Or even better, write a book using the information found here on the forum, and have a publishing company print the book and make some money.

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Anne, years and years ago I thought of a little booklet that I wanted to use to keep track of all the DVD movies that were on my shelves. I thought it might have been a viable little product, but I never did anything with it. I did makeup a simple version with a hard cardstock cover, with pages to put all my titles and what I thought of the movie. My own little critique.
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You could start a Facebook group that had state specific followers, or just a USA version that could get everyone to volunteer their favorite campgrounds. Then you could offer a simple printed piece that followers could purchase for next to printing price. Once you have proof of concept, offer it to a publisher or self publish. Just a thought.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Well I'm sure the tools exist for a full snapshot.

Asking permission is nice, remarkably old school.

The question is, what's in it for Paul?

Nothing. Already excited about the constant scouring of the site by AI agents based on remarkable number of pageviews/huge bandwidth usage, what is the difference?
Taking advantage of interest, now, seems like a good idea.
Put together a compendium of knowledge, condensing it. Most of every page on this site is just neighborly conversation.

The information provided by AI will certainly follow the Silicon Valley model of free until they decide you are hooked, then paid subscription only.
There will be people who can afford to/or will pay, and those who can't/don't. Only the most basic, useless will be free. Agentic AI is already pay only, and prices will go up. Society, I believe, will be divided between those with assets and those without. Those with full access to instant knowledge and those without. Those with useful skills and those without.
There are those who want/tolerate community.
There are those like myself who write in order to think, and prefer a hard copy, paper. I dislike digital reading. I prefer pages to flip, tabs to keep open, time to read when there is no power/bandwidth, no glaring electronic background. Having to run precious, off grid power just to think is way, way short sighted. Kids don't seem to grow up with physical access to analogue, ad free, permanent knowledge in their hands.

Forums in general are declining from the 2010's peak, I can see that. People want instant answers. Forums can only serve those who choose them.
Folks have been migrating to the instant, effortless, critical thought free knowledge of a curated internet. Wading through opinion/chatter in search of facts is tiring. Forums will be irrelevant to anyone not seeking writing or community.

Most topics are already covered by digital downloads and podcasts on this website.

There are many publishers who will convert any digital file you send them into bound paper copy.
Here is one: https://www.iuniverse.com/en
They published a cool paperback about the 1911 baseball season I just read.

I don't envy anyone involved here on the 'stewardship' end. Community is by it's nature free, or maybe a barter of (hopefully knowledgeable) speech/conversation. Finding way to monetize community in order to keep the lights on and hopefully spread the knowledge, seems a difficult act.
Figuring out how to serve the widest audience seems fundamental.

Tommy Bolin wrote:Forums in general are declining from the 2010's peak, I can see that. People want instant answers. Forums can only serve those who choose them.
Folks have been migrating to the instant, effortless, critical thought free knowledge of a curated internet. Wading through opinion/chatter in search of facts is tiring. Forums will be irrelevant to anyone not seeking writing or community.

Fair point -- I hear you. Forums I used to love have already fallen off the cliff; others are teetering on the edge. A lot of knowledge (in a decidedly messy format) has gone offline.

I would certainly be interested in a full, offline copy of this (and other) valuable forums.

I do think distilling facts from these conversations without the attendant context would be quite a challenge. For example, when I post my "facts" for growing things there are a lot of local factors built in, including climate, rainfall, humidity, length of days, length of growing season, and so on. I face different challenges than growers in the UK, Hawaii, or Florida. The danger of distilling is the loss of the local terroir.

I suppose the other aspect worth preserving, at least to my mind, is the respect for process. Homesteading, soil building, and gardening are long processes. The knowledge of "how" is not all that hard to find.  But knowing is not the same as doing -- doing is all about the long process. It's the "why" that is lacking. Community provides the "why."

One thing to remember is just HOW MANY threads and posts there are on permies.

For example, the direct link to Douglas's post above mine is: https://permies.com/t/371415/Preppers-Encyclopedia#3764016

That number after the "T" means that this is the 371,415th thread made on permies.

The number at the very end means that his is the 3,764,016th post here on permies.

Now, sure, not all of those posts are visible. There's spam that gets deleted, etc. But, that's still at least a million or two posts to sift through. Wowsers!

Nicole Alderman wrote:
That number after the "T" means that this is the 371,415th thread made on permies.

The number at the very end means that his is the 3,764,016th post here on permies.

suppose that ai would go through all the threads and pick the top 70%.  And out of the remaining posts, keep the best 70%.    0.7x0.7=0.49.  So about half.

8.5x11 sheets of paper ...  10 posts per page?  1 million pieces of paper, front and back.  A 3 inch binder can hold up to 750 pages.  That's 1500 pages printed front and back.  

1 million pieces of paper divided by 750:  1333 binders.

Absolutely right and no one would be able to read that much or even find what they wanted in it...even if you handwave the problems with owning multiple cargo containers of paper for it.

It's either the top 0.01% of the site, or it's a digital archive. Either one is probably monetizable in some way, but the paper "best of permies" approach probably wouldnt be quite what everyone wanted.

Personally I would suggest the digital archive option, as there are others doing digital archives of wikipedia and ifixit and such. It could fit with those nicely.

Here is a related digital offgrid archive project like the one I had in mind that might be good to mix with a permies snapshot in digital archive form.

offthegridvault.com/blog