Structure of the longturn project

[mu]

While longturn in a way was growing in the last years regarding game frequency and continued influx of new players, its structure remained unchanged. While broadening the admin base in general is a good thing, the question remains how to present and develop the rules in a transparent manner. As of now, there is no rule making procedure separate from free discussion on forum and discord. An official location should be created, where the consolidated rules, as they are now in use, are presented and can be referred to. Outdated rules or stuff that could be mistaken for rules should be deleted. Introducing a moderated procedure for altering the rules in a transparent manner with reasonable deadlines is a desideratum, that would allow all players to be equally heard, independent from their more or less contingent presence in some contingent ad-hoc discussion. Keeping such procedure low traffic and foreseeable hopefully can attract more players to get involved in the process on the long run.

[mu]

The following rules published on https://longturn.net/rules/ are false because they contradict the actual standing rule and practice for longturn games:

"5.3 Delegation should occur only when really necessary, and canceled as soon as the player is able to do his moves again."

In my understanding, delegations are allowed to be in the system always.
What is not allowed is more than 1 player taking the same nation during 1 turn.

"6.2 Surrender - all other live players have surrendered."
"6.3 Surrender - all other live players have surrendered."

The mechanism used instead and for good reasons is victory has to be declard and can be objected.

"6.4 An experimental game cannot be won, as it is by nature endless."

The term experimental game has another meaning atm, obviously.

I therefor propose to immediately change the website as follows:

Substitute first case with 5.3 [...]
Substitue whole Number 6 with the following message: Please refer to the rules specific to your game published by the admin.
or equivalent formulation.

Reason: The false rules on website have been referenced in discord discussion. It is necessary to make clear that they are not valid and to avoid further confusion until a new wording is agreed upon.

[mu]

Online projects for decades know the distinction between announcements and discussion. While discussions are read- and writeable for everyone, announcements are read-only for the public and can be posted only by appointed moderator, that will be identical with the person that is in charge for the topic that is announced. For example the game admin or a software developer.

The distinction not only makes necessary information everybody needs to be aware of easy to find and maintain, it also is imperative to spare those players the necessity to read all discussion that don't have the time for it or do not want to be confronted with it, for whatever reason.

Necessary announcements for playing longturn are opening of signups, test or game start, events during game that everybody needs to know, declaration of victory and objections, game end and result. Also ruleset changes could be announced.

As of now, this forum is only casually maintained and not sufficient to get the info mentioned above.
On the other hand, the quasi-official longturn discord server also does not make the distinction.

I am not aware of a mechanism in discord that allows to make a distinction between read and write permissions, which would be needed for the announcements as drafted above. If there are, I propose to establish a server that is for longturn announcements only. A possible structure for example could be:

-- League (Mod: Kryon)
-- LTT/LTX (Mod: wieder and whoever is admining)
-- SIM (Mod: Corbeau)
-- AU (Mod: wahazar)
-- Software (Mod: devs)
-- Other (Mod: whoever)

If the mod wishes he can structure his announcements with so-called "threads".

Since I'm aware that my proposal is unlikely to be followed, the next best thing would be to establish a category containing only write-restricted announcement channels as above in the quasi-official discord server for longturn.
In that case I'm willing to be member of that server, but I don't want that if the aforementioned distinction is not in place.

If anyone takes note of this, I can imagine certain individuals now will propose to make a "sticky thread" or something at the start of each current game channel where announcements go in. I don't think this is a good idea, because working with discord on "thread-level" does not fulfil the separation requirement for announcements and discussion.

Don't be mistaken: I'm not the only person that is in discord (pun intended) with the current situation. In case write-restriction is doable, this would be the most natural, beneficial and easy to implement improvement for longturn, way easier than coding freeciv for the 21th century, which of course, also is an utmost noble enterprise.
It also could be implemented in this forum, but as things stand, people just do not want.

[Corbeau]

There is an admin write-only channel in the existing server, but it's simply not used as often as it should be, it's called #news-channel. The reason it is not used is simply that we don't really do things officially and professionally, but in our free time and between everything else. So, we could make an additional server, but I am confident that it would be poorly maintained.

Basically, when you are not using existing resources to their fullest, the answer is not to create more resources.

This is an amateur project maintained by a limited number of people. If anyone would like to step into an additional duty, we will welcome it. Asking us to take additional regular duties will probably not result in success.

So, the main question to everyone with ideas is: what are you willing to do to make the whole project better?

[mu]

Asking us to take additional regular duties will probably not result in success.

My proposal is about separating announcement from discussion. This does not increase workload on anyone. The only difference is that whoever announces something that every player needs to be aware of, would do that in a different channel.

While it leaves the workload of officials unchanged, it reduces the workload for everybody else.

Strictly speaking read-only is not a real requirement, it's enough if people are asked not to post in announcement channels.

[Corbeau]

Fair enough. But do you believe that a single channel on the existing server would do?

And what kind of announcements do you believe would have a place there? Can you make a list?

[mu]

Fair enough. But do you believe that a single channel on the existing server would do?
And what kind of announcements do you believe would have a place there? Can you make a list?

My detailed proposition is in posting #3 of this thread.

The whole point of announcement channels as separate place is, they will be low traffic. Still, to have just 1 channel would be hard to overlook. Having a channel for each game on the other hand seems overkill. Therefor I proposed a channel for the league, which could be divided into different levels at some point if necessary, a channel for every ruleset, and, if devs want that, for software, or other stuff that admins want to announce.

A possible list of events to be announced is also in #3 of this thread.

Obviously this only will work if
a) everybody that is admining games is agreeing that this would be useful
b) they're going to use it.

In my opinion the announcements shouldn't be duplicated in the ffa discussion channels.

Again: The important thing is that everyone that is admining a game is in favor of such a structure. Players need to rely on that this is the place to watch

[Corbeau]

Still, to have just 1 channel would be hard to overlook.

Did you mean "easy" instead of "hard"?

[mu]

Still, to have just 1 channel would be hard to overlook.

Did you mean "easy" instead of "hard"?

No, maybe "survey" is better than "overlook". I wanted to say maybe it's too cluttered. Basically a channel only needs to be created once something is offered, no need for AU ruleset channel if there are no such games. If there is a different channel for league and LTT/LTX, that also would allow the persons most likely to be in charge of this to decide about the interior structure of the channel, if they use threads for every game or not.

[panch93]

Ok, so if I understand right, You would like announcement channels for rule/ruleset changes for all the games we are playing. We do have news/announcement channels already which are read-only so it is not really a technical limitation. Every single channel in the *main* category apart from general is read-only and only admins can post in it. So, I guess all that needs to happen now is to agree upon a list of things which needs to be announced so that the mods can use the *news-channel* in the discord server (which is a read only announcement channel) correctly.

One of the things we do is to have a bot post ruleset changes on github directly to discord on the #ruleset-discussion channel. We could maybe move that to a read-only channel.
Apart from that, we have new game announcements and administrative announcements. Administrative announcements already go in #news-channel. Would you like a new read-only channel for new games and game related announcements too ? We could do that.

[mu]

Would you like a new read-only channel for new games and game related announcements too ? We could do that.

Indeed I'm talking about game related announcements. I went to the server to check the main category and posted in general.