(Suggestion) National Anthems

[Bedetopia]

Paid feature all the way to reduce abuse. Absolutely against the WA requirement because my roleplay forbids me from joining.

But wait... can't you just put a link to your anthem in a factbook? It's absolutely useless to try to implement something that can already be done by another means.

[Reploid Productions]

CAPTAIN BUZZKILL IS HERE TO RUIN THE DAY!

I can say with absolute certainty that this is not going to happen, so arguing about population limits, paid versus unpaid, WA as a limiting factor, and so on is entirely moot.

1. The already mentioned Moderation headaches. A pay barrier is not going to be enough to make the moderation workload on this any lighter. As also mentioned, it is much harder to screen automatically the way we can names/fields/etc.
2. The copyright issues. Music rights-holders are very much proactive and very lawsuit trigger-happy. It's annoying enough the infrequent times we get image rights holders getting irate that Random Joe User is using their stuff without permission. The music industry would be about a billion times worse and that's a headache nobody wants.
3. "What about generic royalty-free music?" - Kinda defeats the purpose of "I want my own national anthem!" if people have to select from a bunch of pre-chosen options. In addition, the fine print on many "royalty-free" music purveyors specifically excludes commercial use. Nationstates is, arguably, a commercial venture, in that it generates revenue from ad sales and site supporter paid perks; even if that money is simply covering the site's operational costs rather than acting as a for-profit enterprise. Not to mention the time and effort it would take to track down and locate music we could use and compile such a list. That is admin time better spent on more substantial projects.
4. Storage space issues. There's a reason we limit flag sizes, for instance. And sound files (at least, sound files of remotely decent length or quality) are a lot larger than flag images. There are, right now, 178,200 user accounts. If we gave them, say, 1MB each for an anthem, that's just a hair over 178GB for the entire site. If you want to have anthems that are actual music and not just 16-bit videogame chiptunes, give 'em, say, 5MB for an anthem, that's almost 900GB for the entire site, essentially an entire 1TB drive in the server for nothing BUT anthems. That means more storage, and the much bigger drain on bandwidth to push that data through the series of tubes to folks. (Especially if it ballooned from people attempting to use it as the world's least effective filesharing platform.)
5. We already have a vastly superior tool for sharing customizable information about your nations. You want an anthem? Stick it in a Factbook, grab a link off Youtube. You get your anthem, with none of the headaches listed above. Youtube gets the copyright claim headaches, and anybody linking inappropriate material eventually gets reported and their naughty link removed.

CAPTAIN BUZZKILL AWAAAAAAAAAAAY!


~Evil Forum Empress Rep Prod the Ninja Mod
~She who wields the Banhammer; master of the mighty moderation no-dachi Kiritateru Teikoku

[The Cheeki Breeki Anarchists]

CAPTAIN BUZZKILL IS HERE TO RUIN THE DAY!

I can say with absolute certainty that this is not going to happen, so arguing about population limits, paid versus unpaid, WA as a limiting factor, and so on is entirely moot.

1. The already mentioned Moderation headaches. A pay barrier is not going to be enough to make the moderation workload on this any lighter. As also mentioned, it is much harder to screen automatically the way we can names/fields/etc.
2. The copyright issues. Music rights-holders are very much proactive and very lawsuit trigger-happy. It's annoying enough the infrequent times we get image rights holders getting irate that Random Joe User is using their stuff without permission. The music industry would be about a billion times worse and that's a headache nobody wants.
3. "What about generic royalty-free music?" - Kinda defeats the purpose of "I want my own national anthem!" if people have to select from a bunch of pre-chosen options. In addition, the fine print on many "royalty-free" music purveyors specifically excludes commercial use. Nationstates is, arguably, a commercial venture, in that it generates revenue from ad sales and site supporter paid perks; even if that money is simply covering the site's operational costs rather than acting as a for-profit enterprise. Not to mention the time and effort it would take to track down and locate music we could use and compile such a list. That is admin time better spent on more substantial projects.
4. Storage space issues. There's a reason we limit flag sizes, for instance. And sound files (at least, sound files of remotely decent length or quality) are a lot larger than flag images. There are, right now, 178,200 user accounts. If we gave them, say, 1MB each for an anthem, that's just a hair over 178GB for the entire site. If you want to have anthems that are actual music and not just 16-bit videogame chiptunes, give 'em, say, 5MB for an anthem, that's almost 900GB for the entire site, essentially an entire 1TB drive in the server for nothing BUT anthems. That means more storage, and the much bigger drain on bandwidth to push that data through the series of tubes to folks. (Especially if it ballooned from people attempting to use it as the world's least effective filesharing platform.)
5. We already have a vastly superior tool for sharing customizable information about your nations. You want an anthem? Stick it in a Factbook, grab a link off Youtube. You get your anthem, with none of the headaches listed above. Youtube gets the copyright claim headaches, and anybody linking inappropriate material eventually gets reported and their naughty link removed.

CAPTAIN BUZZKILL AWAAAAAAAAAAAY!

(Image)
~Evil Forum Empress Rep Prod the Ninja Mod
~She who wields the Banhammer; master of the mighty moderation no-dachi Kiritateru Teikoku

Hm, I see.

[Australian rePublic]

Copyright

[Aclion]

I'd be wary of relying on a paywall for protection. I think taking money for the service would only make things worse when it's inevitably abused.
There are some free online libraries exclusively for public domain music files. I don't know if it would be possible to make some sort of deal to allow the servers to pull files from one of them, but it would be cool if it was something we could do.

[Usual People In Life]

Just noticed this thread.

I seem to recall that there was discussion on this idea several years ago.

Digging through the forum search system revealed this thread from 2012: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=189338

The OP in that thread:

I was thinking of this pretty cool idea, game-play wise, in nationstates. Though it would probably be a pane for mods to go through each nation and make sure it has an appropriate anthem, wouldn't it be cool if nations could add an MP3 file that plays when the page is visited?

I'd like something like that. It's easy enough to get and to do, and I don't think it takes too long for the coders to code (but what do I know?) It's just another step further from the in-game factbooks, don't you think?

What's your thoughts, nationstaters?

And the final reply from Fris:

Would it not be simpler to just let users link to their anthem on youtube?

Sure would. And you can already do that in your factbook, so there's less reason to turn a political simulation game into a MySpace clone with musical backgrounds.

I think I'll make my national anthem the Polka station on Pandora. Just to be ornery.

There were a few other opinions from Mods there as well, but I'd rather not quote them all (they'd make this a huge post).

At that time, Sedge mentioned that it had been mentioned and dismissed previously, though I've not been able to track those down.

[Australian rePublic]

The WA requirement is absolutely stupid and unnecessary

[Frisbeeteria]

This idea has been shot down conclusively, not just this time but many times before. Agreements or disagreements with proposed terms are irrelevant, as we're not adding National Anthems as an official service.

Use Dispatches and Factbooks to link to music. We're not going to host it for all the listed reasons.

Thread locked.