Publishing your baits

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Master Baiter Joined: 07 May 2014 Posts: 206

So I have been baiting a lad for four months, never thought it would go this long or be publish worthy (In fact he is the very first lad I emailed.

So now I have a really long thread of Gmail emails. Previously I have put them through word, formatted them and removed the things I don't want showing (like my email) but since this bait is so long it would take ages to do this.

Is there a lazy man's way? Or must I go through 50 pages formatting it all?

Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 6:35 am

There isn't a super quick fix that I've found but one thing that helps is doing a find/replace on things like your email address, character name or other things that you'll have to change a thousand times. Usually I throw everything into a text editor like word and hit control+F/find-replace and go through all of the hot words, also convert everything to plain text. That gets rid of wacky formatting which will just get in your way and doesn't show up in the forum any way. Hope this helps.

Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 10:28 am

If I can throw a quick 2 cents in...

I usually select the best of the best emails back and forth, so we get the gist of the story, and then add your comments in between. Whatever helps with the flow of the bait.

That and the fact that most of us are lazy and don't need every frickin' detail.

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 13 Jan 2014 Posts: 698

I use Google Keep - a neat little free Google app for recording notes. I just copy across what is relevant, editing out what is in the way, as I do so, then add any explanatory or narrative notes, copy the whole lot straight into the relevant box in the forum, add quote boxes and then click on 'submit'. Most of my Gmail characters have access to Keep, so I also store examples of modalities, etc there. It's a simple matter to pull out whatever is needed and paste it into a reply. I also store of lot of stuff like this in 'Dropbox'

Wordpad is handy as well. It has all the editing tools you would need for the level of WP required, including Find/replace. I like the idea of converting to plain text. That has never occurred to me

Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 11:58 am

I put each email in a separate file, whose filename is the date followed by three-letter abbreviations of the character names and a number (usually 1) for the ordinal number of the message that day. Then I run a shell script called "catbait" which concatenates them all in one file. At this point I have a file of quotations like this:

2014-05-28-ann-hup-1 wrote:

Subject: cachorros

Pode você descrever as raças de cães que tem? Queria um cachorro pelo filho meu mas não sei muito das raças.

Annette

I do a find-replace and change the three-letter abbreviations to names. This produces

2014-05-28 Annеtte to Huрkings wrote:

Subject: cachorros

Pode você descrever as raças de cães que tem? Queria um cachorro pelo filho meu mas não sei muito das raças.

Annеtte

Any images I want in the published bait I fakemark and put on Upload Eater and insert the URL in img tags in the bait.

Before I actually publish it, I change a letter in all occurrences of my characters' names to Cyrillic or Armenian (which I already did above because this is a public part of the forum), similarly treat their nonexistent addresses, and redact account numbers and the swift code. Also I change mules' names.

I had some extra work to do for The Libyan Detector Ship because BearSeason put each character's text in a different color, and I had to match them. And the bait above I have extra work to do because it's in Portuguese, much of which is mangled, and I'm only partway through translating it and will then have to show how it's mangled.